


Down Came The Rain

by almostafantasia



Series: Down Came The Rain [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-11-05
Packaged: 2018-04-25 00:43:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4940146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almostafantasia/pseuds/almostafantasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their paths have no reason to cross. That is, until a torrential downpour leaves them both caught at a bus stop with only one umbrella between them, forcing their lives together. Lexa, the private school student from a sheltered family. Clarke, the teenage runaway with no home to call her own. They make an unlikely pair. Friendship doesn’t come easily, but when it does, is that ever going to be enough for either of them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Come and find me on [tumblr](http://almostafantasia.tumblr.com).
> 
> Big thanks to [onemilliongoldstars](http://onemilliongoldstars.tumblr.com) for reading this and giving me the reassurance needed to post it.

The number thirty eight bus has been a regular part of Lexa’s life for the last two and a half years. Lexa is familiar with the scratchy fabric of the seat covers that sometimes catches on the back of her grey uniform skirt, she’s on a first name basis with most of the regular drivers on this service, and she knows exactly where on the bus to find the prime seats to guarantee the least bumpy ride.

Lexa even knows the other regular passengers on the city bus that carries her every day from home to school in the morning and then back again seven hours later. There’s the elderly woman with the mauve raincoat and the wheeled bag filled with groceries, the burly bearded man who always gets on the bus with his two absurdly scrawny dogs, the two boys Lexa’s age from the local high school who sit on the back row playing rap music through the speakers on their phone, the single mom who spends the entirety of her three stop journey trying to get her twin six year old boys to stop fighting with each other. Lexa has never spoken to any of them but she recognises them all, just as they recognise her.

Lexa knows the journey too, probably so well that she could drive it herself with her eyes closed. She knows that it takes between twenty seven and thirty two minutes to do the journey to school, providing that the morning traffic isn’t any worse than normal, but that the journey home again at the end of the day almost always takes exactly twenty two minutes. She knows that the bus will get caught at the traffic lights by the church on the corner of North Avenue nine times out of ten, and that on that one occasion that it doesn’t, they’ll get caught at the next set of lights anyway. The journey is a constant in Lexa’s life. It’s predictable, it’s regular.

Just the way she likes it.

* * *

There have been some irregularities in the running of the number thirty eight bus during the two and a half years Lexa has been catching it twice daily. The first came in January of her freshman year; a set of roadworks three blocks away from Lexa’s school that added approximately five minutes to the journey time each way. There had also been the time that Jerry, a portly balding man in his fifties, Lexa’s favourite of the many bus drivers on this service due to the cheery greeting her gives her in the morning, had been absent from his usual Wednesday morning journey for three weeks because his wife had been seriously ill in hospital.

One irregularity of Lexa’s journey to and from school is the mysterious blonde girl that sometimes waits at the bus stop a two minute walk away from Lexa’s school, who doesn’t get on Lexa’s bus but on the number twenty three service that arrives at the stop four minutes earlier than Lexa’s own. The girl isn’t always at the bus stop, perhaps no more often than one afternoon a week, but when she is, she catches Lexa’s eye.

Lexa’s first impression is that the girl seems cool. She wears not the uncomfortable uniform of the private girls’ school that Lexa attends, but instead usually dons ripped jeans, one of an assortment of dark, loose-fitting t-shirts, and sometimes a leather jacket. Lexa feels self-conscious about her own heavy blazer, restricting tie, and thick grey tights in comparison. She’s never hated her uniform more than on those days that this girl is here.

Sometimes the girl has company, usually in the form of two loud-mouthed and equally cool looking brunette girls. When the three of them are together, Lexa looks on not in admiration, but in slight fear. She’s not the only one. Lexa has noticed how the other people waiting at the bus stop tend to give the three girls a wide berth too. When the three of them are together they talk loudly and they smoke, and Lexa would bet any kind of money that it’s not tobacco that they’re smoking.

The three girls have a large presence at the bus stop. Lexa feels tiny in comparison.

She much prefers it when the blonde girl is alone, sitting on the wall behind the bus stop without her two friends flanking her sides or the joint between her lips. She seems quieter, more closed off when she’s alone, all around much less intimidating than when there’s three of them. Lexa finds herself wondering what this girl’s name is, what her story is, before she realises that none of it matters because she’s just another stranger who she occasionally sees for ten minutes out of the one thousand four hundred and forty in a single day.

Lexa never approaches her, but just watches her from a distance, intrigued and possibly slightly jealous of this girl with her cool jacket and her cool friends and the cool music that she listens to through headphones loud enough for Lexa to hear the dull thud of a rhythmic drum beat even from her seat at the opposite end of the bench.

The girl never notices Lexa. She has no reason to.

* * *

Lexa finally plucks up the courage to speak to the girl in March of her junior year at high school.

March brings with it the usual flurry of rain showers. Sometimes it’s just a thin mist of rain, enough to make Lexa feel slightly soggy as she drops into her seat for first period following the quick dash from the bus stop to school. Other times it’s huge droplets that splatter against the black waterproof fabric of the umbrella that is enough to keep her hair dry, but leaves everything from the elbows down to get completely drenched.

On this particular Friday, it’s a torrential rainstorm that graces the skies. Dark apocalyptic clouds swirl overhead, enormous puddles of water collect around the drains at the side of the road as thick rain droplets splatter against everything they can. Lexa’s fourth period gym class gets moved from the hockey fields behind the main school building to the large gymnasium, not even the gym teachers being cruel enough to force the girls outside in this weather. Two hours later in history class, Lexa stares out of the window at the ominous grey sky, occasionally disturbed by a flash of lightning that briefly illuminates the entire classroom in its white glow, causing her classmates to whisper amongst themselves in a way that has the teacher scolding them and asking for silence.

At the end of the school day, Lexa is extremely grateful for the hideously practical school-regulation raincoat bundled up in the bottom of her locker, slipping her arms into the sleeves and picking up her umbrella with her other hand, ready to face the brutal weather that awaits beyond the doors.

The bus stop is surprisingly crowded when Lexa arrives. There’s a shelter, but it’s only a small one, and the weather means it’s already full of pupils from both Lexa’s school and the public high school just around the corner. Lexa pulls her coat more tightly around her and tenses the fingers that are grasped around the handle of her umbrella as she stands against the wall behind the bus shelter.

It’s as the number twenty three bus pulls up at the bus stop that the blonde girl appears, catching Lexa’s eye as she runs along the sidewalk to join the back of the queue to get on the bus. She doesn’t have an umbrella or even a coat, the only thing warding out the rain is a dark grey hooded sweatshirt that is already completely soaked. The girl’s blonde hair hangs in damp curls around her face, a few tendrils plastered to her forehead and cheeks. Lexa watches as she finally boards the bus, fishing around in her pocket for the change needed to pay her fare, then loses interest and turns her head to look down the road for her own bus.

It’s a commotion on the bus parked at the stop that brings Lexa’s attention back to the blonde girl. She seems to be in an argument with the driver, and though Lexa can’t catch every word, she can hear the girl raise her voice, spewing the occasional profanity.

The girl eventually gets back off the bus, which drives away without her on board. Lexa watches her kick angrily at a stone on the sidewalk and let out a single expletive.

“Fuck!”

Startled by the outburst, but as intrigued by this girl as ever, Lexa glances around at the other people waiting at the bus stop, before inching closer to the girl.

“Excuse me,” she ventures tentatively. “Excuse me, is everything okay?”

The girl’s head snaps up as soon as she realises that Lexa is addressing her, and Lexa is met with a strong gaze from sky blue eyes, brows furrowed in frustration and a questioning expression on her face. Lexa watches as the girl’s eyes scan over her, taking in the ugly raincoat that hangs unflatteringly over her pristine uniform.

“Why do you care?” asks the girl, her voice full of uncertainty and her shoulders hunched defensively.

Lexa swallows and then takes a deep breath before continuing, “It’s just that I saw you try and get on that bus, only you’re still here and seem quite upset about something.”

“I’m not upset,” protests the girl, who then glances once down at her feet, as if embarrassed about something. She elaborates, “I just didn’t have enough change for the bus, that’s all.”

Without even thinking, Lexa says, “I can give you some change if you need it. Your fare can’t be more than a couple of dollars…”

Lexa is already reaching into her satchel to find her wallet when the girl’s response comes.

“I don’t need your charity!”

Lexa recoils, withdrawing her hand from inside her bag and cowering away. The girl glares at her, as if offering her two dollars in change has somehow offended her.

“I’m sorry, I was only trying to help,” apologises Lexa, letting her head droop in sadness.

“Save it for someone who actually wants it,” snaps the girl, who then turns away from Lexa and, hoisting her backpack higher up onto her shoulders, goes to stand just a few metres away from Lexa.

Lexa had thought that the weather couldn’t really get much worse, barring an actual hurricane tearing through the city centre, but the wind chooses that moment to send a particularly cold gust down the street. Using one hand to stop her skirt from blowing up and the other to wrestle with the umbrella that threatens to soar out of her hand completely, Lexa takes a few steps forward until she’s standing in front of the bus timetable. The girl stays in her peripheral vision and Lexa doesn’t miss the way that she shivers, folding her arms across her chest in an attempt to keep the warmth in, an effort that is completely futile because there is not an inch of the girl’s hoodie that is not already drenched with cold rainwater. Using her finger to scan down the timetable, Lexa finds the schedule for the number twenty three bus and makes a decision.

Ignoring the fact that the blonde girl made it perfectly clear that she didn’t want help from Lexa or anybody else, Lexa goes to stand beside her, switching over which hand she holds the umbrella in so that it covers both of them.

“What are you doing?” barks the girl. “I told you, I’m fine on my own.”

“Your bus only comes every half an hour,” says Lexa.

“What are you, some kind of stalker?” snorts the girl.

“What I mean to say,” elaborates Lexa, “is that even if you had the correct change to get home, which you don’t, you’d have to wait for half an hour until it arrives, and the rain doesn’t look like it’s going to let up any time soon.”

The girl doesn’t say anything, but Lexa thinks she can almost hear the roll of her eyes. Not pausing for long enough to let herself get embarrassed or back out, Lexa presses on.

“My bus, on the other hand, arrives in just a couple of minutes,” she continues. “I could lend you the change to cover a fare and you could come back to mine to dry off. I would hate for you to have to wait out here on your own in the rain. You could catch pneumonia or something.”

“Hyopthermia.”

Lexa frowns across at the girl, who still resiliently keeps her gaze fixed straight ahead, as if she’s refusing to acknowledge Lexa’s presence beside her.

“Sorry, what?”

“I’m more likely to catch hypothermia than pneumonia by staying out in the rain,” explains the girl.

“Okay, you could catch hypothermia then,” Lexa corrects herself, slightly startled that out of all the things the girl could choose to be talkative about, it turns out to be medical conditions. “So what do you say?”

The girl finally looks up at Lexa. Her blue eyes are softer than they were when they first glared at Lexa a couple of minutes ago, giving her a glimpse of the girl hidden behind the ripped jeans and the _don’t care_ attitude. Lexa doesn’t know who that girl is yet, but she can definitely tell that there is somebody there.

“You’re inviting me to your house?” clarifies the girl.

“I am. I can dry your clothes for you and then you can be on your way. It won’t take long.”

A hint of a smirk passes across the girl’s face. She looks at Lexa with the beginnings of a challenge on her face.

“How do you know I’m not a murderer? I could kill you in cold blood, bury you in the back yard and then steal the contents of your fridge.”

Lexa’s eyes widen momentarily at the girl’s words, then she relaxes once more, and says, “I think the fact that the first thing you would do after murdering me is check what’s in my fridge tells me that you aren’t a murderer.”

The brief moment of silence that follows tells Lexa that she’s won that one, and she can’t help but smile to herself as the girl mutters under her breath, “Smarty pants.”

The number thirty-eight bus pulls up to the stop and Lexa takes a couple of steps towards it, glancing over her shoulder to where the girl still leans against the wall, wiping her soggy hair out of her eyes with one hand.

"Are you coming?" Lexa asks.

The girl shoots her an apprehensive look, and Lexa is just about ready to get on the bus without her, when the girl makes a quick decision and jogs over to join Lexa.

"Two please," Lexa says to the bus driver, one of the more friendly ones called Ted that has been transporting Lexa to and from school since her freshman year, sliding the correct change across to him.

The girl mumbles something incoherent which is definitely not a thank you, but is probably supposed to be an alternative, and strides past Lexa to sit on her own at the back of the bus.

* * *

“You never told me your name,” Lexa says to the girl when they get off the bus in Lexa’s neighbourhood.

The hesitation before the girl answers immediately makes Lexa think that she’s being given an incorrect name, and a fresh wave of panic washes over Lexa as she worries that she may actually be inviting a genuine murderer to her house. Or, from the way that the girl’s eyes first widen when she sees the size of the houses in this area, a thief waiting to steal all the valuables from Lexa’s home.

“Clarke.”

“Is that your real name?”

The girl – Clarke – chuckles for a moment, and then says, “Yes. I was trying to figure out whether I should give you a false name but I decided against it. Stranger danger, you know?”

“I could be taking you back to mine to murder you,” agrees Lexa.

Clarke says nothing, but instead just laughs, and Lexa would perhaps be appreciative that this is the nicest noise she’s heard leave Clarke’s lips since they met half an hour ago, were it not for the fact that she is clearly laughing at Lexa.

“What?” frowns Lexa.

“You, a murderer?” Clarke continues to laugh, letting out an inelegant little snort in the process. “Oh, please!”

Lexa slows down to let Clarke fall into step beside her, pouting at the blonde girl as she asks, “You don’t think I could be a murderer?”

Clarke shakes her head, the traces of laughter still on her face.

“What are you going to do? Hit me with your lacrosse stick? Bore me to death by reciting the digits of pi? Come on, you act like I’m insulting you by saying you don’t seem like a murderer. It’s a compliment, okay?”

Lexa’s jaw drops open at Clarke’s words. She doesn’t know whether she should feel offended or not at the way Clarke is clearly sterotyping her, seeing the school uniform and assuming that she has to be a rich stuck-up nerd.

“I know your type,” continues Clarke, apparently reading Lexa’s mind. “Everyone knows that the number of buttons you have done up on your shirt is directly proportional to the marks you get in tests, so don’t go telling me that you’re not a straight A student.”

Lexa’s hand instinctively reaches up to her neck, where her tie sits neatly at her collar, and sure enough, the buttons are done right up to the top. Lexa is more than familiar with the way that some of her classmates wear their uniform; ties loose around their necks, buttons undone far enough to show a bit of cleavage, skirts several inches shorter than the uniform guidelines state they should be. Lexa knows they do it to look cool, but she isn’t willing to risk her perfect record by getting into trouble over something as stupid as how she’s dressed.

Feeling only mildly annoyed at Clarke’s quick, though accurate, judgement of her, Lexa turns the conversation to her new companion and asks, “So are you at the local high school?”

Clarke snorts and sends a pointed look Lexa’s way, which seems to say something along the lines of are you serious?

“Well I’m not at your fancy school, am I?" scoffs Clarke, screwing up her nose as if going to Lexa's school would be _that_ bad.

"Sorry," Lexa lowers her eyes, following the sidewalk as it bends around a corner onto the road upon which her house lies.

Clarke clearly isn't prepared for Lexa's apology and for the way that she just backs down the moment that Clarke starts getting overly defensive, because she freezes momentarily, almost tripping over herself. She wears a look of alarm on her usually frowning face, though it is only brief, before she recovers herself and sends out an apology of her own.

"Sorry, I didn't mean it to come out like that," she says, her voice now with a slightly softer edge to it than Lexa has heard thus far. "Yes, I'm at the local high school." Clarke pauses for a second, then adds with a playful glint in her ocean blue eyes, "When I can be bothered to go, of course."

Not for the first time this afternoon, and Lexa would bet anything that it won’t be for the last time either, Lexa's jaw drops open at Clarke's words.

"You mean you don't always go to school?" she gasps.

Clarke avoids having to give a straight answer by deflecting Lexa's question with one of her own, something which Lexa has already noted, even in this short period of knowing each other, that the blonde seems to have a knack for doing.

"Don't tell me you've never skipped school before?" asks Clarke incredulously, as if having a willingness to be educated isn't normal in the slightest.

"No," blushes Lexa, feeling almost inadequate for leading what she believes to be a fairly ordinary rule-abiding life.

"Wow," breathes Clarke. "Well I usually go to school most days, but very rarely for the entire day. When I have math last period I usually bunk off early."

That explains why Clarke is so rarely at the bus stop after school, thinks Lexa, though she finds herself worrying more about Clarke's grades. Lexa hates to miss even a single day of school for something unavoidable such as illness, not wanting to miss an important topic that could make it hard for her to keep up in the following class. She can't imagine how behind Clarke must be if she skips school on a regular basis. Perhaps her private education is shrouding her in a biased cloud of personal ambition, but Lexa struggles to fathom how somebody can take so little interest in their own future prospects that they don't care about getting a decent education.

"I could corrupt you, you know, if you'd like," Clarke suggests.

Lexa doesn't know exactly how Clarke is proposing to corrupt her, whether she just means that she would invite Lexa to bunk off school together, or if she's on about an entirely different variety of corruption. (Lexa immediately feels guilty for even having that thought, and becomes incredibly aware of how red her cheeks are becoming.) Or perhaps Clarke is just joking to get a rise out of Lexa.

"No thanks," Lexa mumbles.

" _Jesus_ , you're boring," Clarke complains loudly.

Lexa doesn't get the chance to defend herself, not that she would be able to come up with a witty retort to rival any of Clarke's on the spur of the moment, because they have arrived outside Lexa's house. Inferring what she can from Clarke about the girl's obviously very different upbringing, Lexa tries not to feel too self-conscious about the size of her house; the electric gates that she has to press a button on a device attached to her keyring to open, the immaculately trimmed lawn lined with neat beds of purple and white flowers, the driveway large enough to comfortably hold at least three cars.

Clarke verbalises everything that Lexa knows she must have been thinking in one short exclamation.

"Holy shit, your parents must be loaded!"

Choosing to ignore Clarke's outburst, Lexa slots her key into the lock on the front door, twists it gently, then pushes on the door to open it, letting Clarke step inside first.

"Wow," breathes Clarke, hovering on the mat just inside the front door, where the rainwater drenching her clothes steadily drips off her into a little puddle at her feet.

Lexa shakes her umbrella out on the porch, then nudges past Clarke to hang her raincoat up on the hook by the door, kicking off her school shoes. The usually shiny leather now has splashes of muddy water over them, and Lexa makes a mental note to polish the shoes before her parents return home from work later.

"Do you want a bath to warm you up?" Lexa asks Clarke. "I can put your clothes in the dryer while you take it."

Clarke gives Lexa a look as if Lexa has suddenly started speaking in a strange language.

"A bath?" she repeats, as if the concept of bathing oneself is an unfamiliar one only available to the upper middle class.

"You know, to wash yourself,” Lexa elaborates, once again finding an unpleasant flush rising to her cheeks for no good reason.

"I do know what a bath is, rich girl," smirks Clarke. "And yes please, if it's not too much hassle."

Lexa leads the way upstairs, her stockinged feet padding softly across the plush carpeted floor. She’s grateful that Clarke has at least had the decency to kick off her own filthy combat boots, because Lexa’s parents would _kill_ her if they came home from work to find a trail of muddy footprints all the way up the pristine carpet of their grand staircase.

"Okay, so I get that your parents are rich, but don't you think that a chandelier is a bit excessive?"

Lexa smiles to herself, allowing herself to glance up at the large chandelier that hangs from the ceiling above the staircase, elegant silver twisted into ornate patterns with hundreds of tiny glass beads hanging in decorative loops around twelve small bulbs.

"That's what I told my parents when we moved in here but they insist that it's classy."

"It's posh as fuck," comes Clarke's only addition to the conversation, and though Lexa is inclined to agree with Clarke's statement, she tries not to wince as she imagines what her parents' reactions would be to such language being used in their own home.

Lexa doesn't scold Clarke for her choice of words, but instead leads her across the landing and into the large family bathroom. Clarke's mouth once again drops open in awe, and her fingers dance along the edge of the stand-alone bathtub and across the decorative gold taps.

"Turn them on," Lexa instructs her, and Clarke obediently follows, twisting the ornate knobs until a steady stream of water splashes heavily against the bottom of the tub.

Clarke holds one hand under the running water, using the other to twist the knobs this way and that until she stands back, satisfied with the temperature. Lexa crosses the bathroom, her arms full of bottles taken from the cabinet in the corner, which she carefully lines up on the edge of the bath. She unscrews one of the caps and pours a generous amount of the gloop inside into the bath, stepping back with a pleased smile on her face when bubbles begin to froth and foam on the surface of the water.

"Shampoo, conditioner and soap are all here," says Lexa, gesturing to the bottles. "I'll go and fetch you a towel."

Lexa hurries out of the bathroom and opens the closet where the towels are kept, taking a thick white towel and a plush navy bathrobe out, before returning to Clarke.

To Clarke, who is now standing in the middle of the bathroom in just her underwear, skinny jeans pooled around her ankles.

"Oh!" exclaims Lexa. "I'm so sorry. I didn't realise you were undressing."

Lexa stares for perhaps a moment too long, long enough for Clarke to see that her eyes are wide at the sight of the matching set of black lace underwear. Of course Clarke's underwear would match. And of course they'd be so irrefutably, arousingly sexy.

Blushing harder than ever before, harder than she even thought possible, Lexa glances away, bending to place the towel and the robe in a neatly folded pile on the bathroom floor. She tries to focus anything except for the fact that this almost stranger who is in her bathroom, wearing nothing but two sinful scraps of lace, is the closest that Lexa has ever come to seeing a naked girl in her seventeen years.

"I'll leave you to it," mumbles Lexa, desperately avoiding the sheer amount of pale flesh that she can see in her peripheral vision. "Call out to me if there's anything else you need."

"Wait!"

Clarke's shout causes Lexa to freeze, one hand outstretched in the direction of the door handle. Lexa slowly turns her head, swallowing and keeping it her eyes firmly fixed on Clarke's face and not the rest of her underwear-clad body.

"You need to take my clothes if you're going to dry them," says Clarke. She's surprisingly calm about the whole situation. Lexa expected, from what she's seen of Clarke's interactions with her so far, and the fact that Clarke is the type of person to just drop her clothes in front of a stranger, that Clarke’s eyes would be full of that familiar teasing smirk upon seeing Lexa so flustered. But they aren't.

"Oh. Yes. Of course."

Clarke turns until her back is facing Lexa, and then with absolutely no warning at all, unsnaps her bra then drags the lace panties down her legs until she is completely naked.

Lexa just gawks at her, eyes wide and breathing uneven, watching is disbelief as Clarke unabashedly climbs into the bathtub that is now filled with steaming bubbly water, her bare back still facing Lexa. Thankfully. Lexa thinks that she may be susceptible to a heart attack, should Clarke turn to face her with everything on show.

"Right," flusters Lexa, grabbing the soggy pile of Clarke's discarded clothes and making a hasty exit from the bathroom, closing the door behind her, though not quick enough to block out the ungodly moan of pleasure that Clarke lets out as she sinks into the scalding water.

" _Fuck_ , that feels good."

Lexa thinks that that sound might be engrained in her memory forever.

* * *

Clarke descends the stairs thirty minutes later calling out Lexa's name, and when Lexa hurries over to greet her, she lets out a sigh of relief to see that Clarke has at least had the decency to slip into the robe.

(Lexa may or may not have spent the last thirty minutes somewhere between hopeful excitement and sheer panic at the thought of Clarke wrapping herself in nothing but the towel that Lexa left for her.)

"Hey," says Clarke, padding barefoot down the last remaining stairs until she's level with Lexa.

"Hello, Clarke. Was the bath to your liking?"

Clarke's eyebrows do something weird and she almost cracks a smile, before tilting her head to the side slightly and nodding.

"Good," smiles Lexa. "I’m about to make myself a mug of warm cocoa, if you'd like one too. Your clothes are nearly dry."

Clarke stays as she is for a few seconds, considering Lexa's offer, then declines with nothing more than a shake of her head. Lexa wanders around the kitchen as she busies herself with making her cocoa, feeling the set of eyes follow her around as she goes and trying to ignore the fact that they belong to a girl who is wearing nothing but a plush bathrobe.

She doesn't attempt to make conversation. Lexa has never been the best at idle chitchat and Clarke comes across as a very closed off person. Besides, Lexa's previous attempts at smalltalk all ended with Clarke making fun of her in some way or another. So when her cocoa is ready, Lexa simply hoists herself up onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar in her kitchen and sips on the warm drink slowly.

Clarke remains where she is, leaning against a counter on the other side of the room, the robe open enough at the neck to reveal a single protruding collar bone beneath pale skin.

For Lexa's own sanity, Clarke's clothes can't dry fast enough.

They do finish their cycle in the dryer eventually though, just as Lexa drains the final dregs of her cocoa, and after ten minutes of awkwardly watching Clarke gaze in awe around Lexa's large and well-equipped kitchen, desperately hoping that she won't make another indirect dig Lexa's wealth by commenting on her mother's enormous stove or the top-of-the-range double-doored fridge. Clarke dresses as unashamedly as she undressed earlier, pulling her underwear up beneath the robe and then dropping the robe unceremoniously with her back to Lexa to cover up her top half, not caring that Lexa is in the room too trying her best not to ogle the other girl with wide eyes.

Clarke slips her arms into the sleeves of her grey hoodie and lets out a content little sigh at the feeling of the freshly laundered material against the bare skin of her arms in comparison to the chilly waterlogged jacket it had been earlier, then looks at Lexa earnestly as she says, “I should probably go.”

Lexa nods in agreement.

"My parents will be home from work soon."

Lexa regrets the words as soon as they pass her lips. She didn't mean for it to sound the way it did, as if Clarke is such a lowlife that Lexa would be embarrassed for her parents to meet her, but that's the way it comes out. Clarke's eyes momentarily fill with disappointment, and Lexa wants to apologise and tell her that she can stay for dinner if she likes, but the sadness within the sky blue orbs is gone almost as quickly as it appears.

"Right," says Clarke with a brisk nod.

"Clarke..."

Clarke looks up, and Lexa briefly considers giving her the apology that she deserves, but she chickens out last minute and reaches for her own wallet, unzipping it and emptying a pile of coins into the open palm of her other hand. Her eyes scan the money, quickly determining that there's more than enough in change to cover a bus journey all the way to the other side of town, if necessary.

"Here," says Lexa, holding out her hand for Clarke to take the money. "This should get you home."

At first Clarke appears as reluctant to accept as she had done at the bus stop earlier today, only less angry than before. However after a moment of hesitation, she seems to remember that she doesn't have the change herself, or the weather outside, or perhaps both, and she accepts Lexa's money with only the tiniest of indistinguishable grumbles.

"Do you want to borrow an umbrella?" Lexa asks her.

"No, it's fine," replies Clarke. "You've done enough."

They cross over to the front door, where Clarke slips her feet into her boots and picks up her backpack from where she’s left it next to Lexa’s own schoolbag. Lexa reaches for the latch and tugs on it, the heavy oak door swinging open. It's still raining outside, though nowhere near as hard as before, and the gloom of the dark clouds overhead is not as noticeable now that the sky is getting darker as the evening progresses anyway.

"Okay," says Clarke, stepping out into the porch and swiftly pulling her hood over her head. "Um ... cool. See you around, I guess."

It's meant as a thank you, Lexa knows that much, but either Clarke's parents never taught her even the most basic of manners, or she's just too plain stubborn to admit that Lexa has done her more than one favour tonight. Lexa suspects that it's more likely to be the latter.

"Bye, Clarke."

And just like that, Clarke disappears off down Lexa's drive and into the street beyond the electric gates, backpack slung low on her shoulders as she trudges away through the rain.

* * *

Lexa doesn’t see Clarke at the bus stop for another five days, though that isn’t to say that she doesn’t look for her. Lexa keeps her eyes peeled every afternoon at the bus stop for a leather jacket or a flash of blonde hair, but when she catches sight of either it is never Clarke that it belongs to.

On the Wednesday after Lexa first meets Clarke, she arrives at the bus stop to see a familiar figure already leaning on the low wall, wearing her worn leather jacket and with a wire trailing from the phone in her hand to each of her ears. Lexa smiles at the sight and wanders over to sit on the moss covered wall beside Clarke.

“Hello, Clarke.”

Clarke’s head tilts up at Lexa’s greeting, and the blue eyes meet Lexa’s own with a look of recognition, though Clarke says nothing in response, not even a hello of her own. Lexa wonders whether the music that she can hear blasting though the earbuds is the reason she chooses not to speak to Lexa, or rather an excuse not to.

It does not matter either way however, as Clarke’s number twenty three bus chooses that exact moment to pull up at the bus stop. Clarke hoists her backpack up onto her shoulders and slides the phone into her jacket, before she reaches a hand into the back pocket of her jeans and pulls out a fistful of change.

Watching Clarke join the back of the queue to get onto the bus, Lexa feels her heart pound slightly faster in her chest as instead of remaining where she is to wait the final few minutes until the arrival of her own bus, Lexa follows Clarke onto the bus and gives her own fare to the driver.

“This isn’t your bus,” states Clarke, speaking for the first time when she notices Lexa drop into the seat behind her as the bus starts moving.

“I’m meeting a friend,” Lexa repeats the already rehearsed lie with only the tiniest sense of unease.

“And there was me thinking that you were stalking me,” Clarke smirks at Lexa.

When Clarke promptly closes her eyes and leans her head against the window of the bus, Lexa glances down to the floor beneath the seat in front and sees that Clarke has stowed her backpack there, realising that her task is going to be easier than originally anticipated. Lexa reaches into her own leather satchel and pulls out an envelope with Clarke’s name written across it in Lexa’s neat handwriting and underlined twice, then leans down as slowly as possible so as to not disturb Clarke, one arm outstretched in the direction of Clarke’s bag. Lexa draws the zip down as quietly as she can, and then when the bag is open wide enough, she slides the envelope inside and closes it again.

The bus pulls up at a stop a couple of minutes later and Lexa gathers her things together as she gets to her feet.

“Bye, Clarke.”

Clarke opens her eyes for long enough to grunt in response, then closes them again as Lexa gets off the bus. Having travelled for ten minutes in the wrong direction, Lexa waits for the bus to disappear around the corner before she crosses the road to get a bus back to her own house, trying not to think of the fact that she’s just left an envelope containing two hundred dollars of her parents’ money in the backpack of a virtual stranger.

* * *

Lexa doesn’t know Clarke very well at all, but she’s pretty sure that she knows the blonde well enough to not expect a thank you the next time they’re both at the bus stop. Clarke is far too stubborn for that. What Lexa had not been expecting, is for Clarke to show up at her front door after school two days later.

“What the fuck do you think this is?” Clarke demands as soon as Lexa opens the door, brandishing the envelope that Lexa had left for her in one hand, now slightly creased, and the seal having been torn open.

Lexa cowers away from Clarke, flinching at the harsh edge to the blonde’s words.

“I…” Lexa stumbles over her words. “It’s a gift, from me to you.”

“Why?” barks Clarke.

“Because…”

Lexa trails off, shifting her weight onto her other foot and glancing down at the floor.

“Go on," Clarke prompts her.

“Because you need it more than I do," Lexa blurts out, then immediately recoils, hunching her shoulders over in remorse of each word that has just left her lips.

“What makes you think I don’t have money?”

“You couldn’t afford the fare last week!" protests Lexa, suddenly feeling incredibly intimidated by the blonde girl in the leather jacket that she's almost come to trust and respect in something approaching, though not quite, a friendship.

“I didn’t have the right change on me," scowls Clarke. "There’s a difference.”

“You got this weird look in your eyes when you were in my house, as if you couldn’t quite believe how much money my parents have. As if you don’t have any money of your own.”

“Not all of us can be as rich as you," spits Clarke.

Lexa feels momentarily ashamed of herself, which is stupid really, because she had no choice in which family she was born into, no more of a choice in the fact that she was born as the first and only child of two high-flying well-paid lawyers, than Clarke had a choice of being born into a situation without the same privileges that Lexa has grown accustomed to. But her desire to be charitable wins out over the shame, and she asks a question that has been on her mind for a couple of days now.

“How long have you been homeless, Clarke?”

Whatever Clarke had been expecting her to say next, it clearly wasn't that, because her eyes widen suddenly.

“What?" exclaims Clarke. "I’m not…" Clarke's surprise changes to a more hardened version of the glare that Lexa is used to and she goes on the defensive. "What makes you think I’m homeless?”

“When I slipped the envelope into your bag, it wasn’t full of school books, but clothes. I thought it was strange at first, but it all fits.”

Clarke remains silent for a few moments...

“You don’t know me.”

The absence of a denial as good as confirms Lexa’s suspicions that Clarke has no permanent home.

“I don’t,” agrees Lexa. “But I want to help you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“No," Lexa shakes her head, "you don’t _want_ my help.”

“I’m not a charity case!” bellows Clarke, and Lexa actually takes a step backwards into her own home as Clarke's shrill cry rips through the air between them.

“I know you’re not," Lexa says with all the kindness she can muster, "but I can’t stand to think of you struggling to even feed yourself when I’ve got all this extra money that I don’t need.”

“You don’t know me,” repeats Clarke.

“Please let me help you," begs Lexa.

“I can’t accept your money, Lexa.”

Lexa tries to imagine the situation if their roles were reversed, if Clarke was the one with the huge house and the trust fund and _she_ was living on the streets with few enough possessions to fit into a single backpack. She tries to imagine what it must be like to not have a permanent home to go back to, no warm dinner waiting for her on the table, no comfortable bed to curl up into at night, and thinks of what that would do to her character. And suddenly, she gets it. Clarke's stubbornness isn't just a natural rudeness, it's a skin that she's grown and adapted for herself to survive the harsh world that lies beyond the world of electric gates and chandeliers and private education, a world that Lexa knew next to nothing about until she met Clarke. And Lexa thinks that perhaps, were their positions reversed, that she would refuse to accept a stranger's money too.

“Then at least stay for dinner," Lexa offers as a compromise. "My parents are away on business tonight and they gave me money for takeout. We can share.”

“I don’t know…” Clarke starts to protest.

“The local pizza place is doing a deal. It won’t cost me much more to get enough for both of us and if you don’t stay I’ll have leftovers anyway." Clarke still looks unsure, and so Lexa resorts once more to begging. "Please, Clarke, let me do this one thing for you.”

Clarke's blue-eyed glare, once ice cold yet now so familiar, feels like it is piercing through Lexa's skull, yet where Lexa once would have cowered away in terror, she now holds the gaze. Perhaps after realising that Lexa is not going to retract her offer, Clarke finally concedes.

“Fine.”

* * *

An hour later finds Lexa and Clarke sitting on either end of the couch, two almost empty pizza boxes and an assortment of dips spread out between them as they watch old reruns of some sitcom that Lexa has never seen before but Clarke insists is good. Lexa isn't complaining. Clarke looks more relaxed than Lexa has ever seen her before, the usual guard that she has around her hasn't been seen since the pizza was delivered twenty minutes ago. Clarke sits with her knees tucked up beneath her on the couch, something that Lexa's mom would no doubt chide Lexa for if she ever sat like that, a slice of pizza in her hand and a content smile tugging at the corners of her lips. Every so often, Clarke’s lips will part as she throws her head back and lets out a short burst of bright laughter. Lexa always misses the jokes that illicit such a response, finding Clarke much more captivating than the characters goofing off on the television.

As the pizza disappears completely and the show moves onto its second episode, Clarke picks up on Lexa's wandering attention.

"Are you watching me or the TV?"

Lexa returns her gaze to the screen hanging on the wall across the room, feigning laughter as one character she can't remember the name of cracks a joke at the expense of another with an equally evasive name.

Quickly becoming aware that Clarke is no longer watching the show, but rather seems to be keeping most of her attention on her, Lexa sits completely still, not letting her eyes stray even momentarily from the television screen. Despite that, Lexa is definitely not paying attention to the happenings of the characters on the show. She finds that it is impossible to keep her focus on anything but the thought of Clarke, knowing that the blue eyes on the other end of the couch keep wandering to watch her.

"Lexa?"

Clarke's voice makes Lexa jump unexpectedly, and she lets herself look at the blonde, who is unsurprisingly yet again looking at her. What is surprising, however, is the expression that Clarke wears on her face. What is usually pushed into a hardened frown, is now much softer, much more inquisitive than ever before.

"Lexa, why did you really give me all that money?"

Lexa feels as if time stands still for a moment. The television seems to stop blaring in the background, her heart stops in her chest and her entire body freezes under Clarke’s inquiring gaze. She blinks, then tries to swallow, but her mouth has suddenly gone incredibly dry, and Lexa doesn’t think that she’d be able to get the words out even if she had the right answer to Clarke’s question.

"And don't give me any of that _because you need it more than I do_ crap," adds Clarke. "What I mean is why me? Why give it to me instead of donating to a homeless shelter or something? How do you know that I wouldn't go and spend it all on alcohol or drugs?"

"Because..." Lexa fumbles around for an answer for a brief moment, before the startling truth finds its way to the tip of her tongue. "Because I trust you, Clarke."

"You trust me?"

Lexa scans Clarke's face for any sign that she's giving the wrong answer, then inclines her head only fractionally in confirmation.

"So it wasn't because..."

Clarke trails off, and for the first time, she seems nervous. Lexa has never seen Clarke as anything but completely in control of herself, her words and actions. She’s always confident, defensive, almost bordering on cocky. The change is surprising, but the vulnerability that Lexa sees in Clarke's eyes, swirling into the now familiar blue, is a reminder that even Clarke, no matter how much more outgoing and world-worn she is than Lexa, is just human too.

"Because what?" Lexa encourages Clarke to finish.

Clarke looks down and picks up the empty pizza boxes, collecting the little tubs of sauces and moving everything onto the coffee table. Lexa frowns at the blonde's actions, not quite understanding what the purpose of this is, not until Clarke shuffles across the now empty couch until she's sitting right beside Lexa. Lexa still doesn't understand what Clarke's motives are, but her close proximity to the blonde now means that she's finding it really hard to concentrate on anything other than the fact that Clarke is sitting so near to her that their knees are touching and her slightly musky smell is all that fills Lexa's nostrils.

Clarke's eyes are firmly trained on Lexa's and she leans in slightly. Lexa's breath catches in her throat, and Clarke must surely hear it because the corner of her mouth twitches ever so slightly, though not quite turning up into a smile. Lexa's eyes are what finally betray her thoughts, because although she wills them not to look away from Clarke's gaze, wanting to wait and see what the blonde will do next, Clarke's stare becomes just a little too intense mere inches from Lexa's face, and so she has to glance away.

To Clarke's lips. Of course her gaze had to go there of all places. Now Clarke is going to know that all Lexa can think about is what it would be like to...

_Oh_.

_That's_ what it's like.

Clarke's lips press against Lexa's, tentatively at first, but then with a little more pressure, and then they are kissing. Clarke is kissing her. _Lexa_ _is_ _kissing_ _Clarke_.

The initial surprise of the kiss gone, Lexa finds herself mentally flailing. She's never kissed a girl before, though she's lain awake in bed many a night, imagining what it would be like to feel soft lips against her own. She never imagined that it would be like this though, with the intriguing blonde girl from the bus stop that she never even thought she would pluck up the courage to speak to, let alone invite into her house and end up kissing on the expensive leather couch of her parents' living room.

Regaining her composure, Lexa sighs into the kiss and responds to Clarke's touch, opening her mouth and moving her lips in a way that she hopes is beneficial to mutual enjoyment. Lexa knows that she's enjoying this kiss, she can only hope that Clarke is too.

Feeling Clarke's lips turn up at the corners, the first indication that she's perhaps not a completely terrible kisser, Lexa mentally pats herself on the back, all those months in her sophomore year spent second guessing her own sexuality finally coming to fruition. This, Lexa thinks, is possibly what she was born for. For kissing pretty girls as if they are the only two people in the world. Which, Lexa notes happily, they may as well be right now.

As quickly as she started it, Clarke ends the kiss, pulling back far enough for Lexa to see that her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are hazy with the same kind of pleasure that Lexa feels washing over her own body.

"So it wasn't because you wanted to do that?"

Lexa swallows, trying to remember how to use her mouth for something other than kissing, and attempts to form words into a vaguely coherent sentence.

"Not specifically. I ... I guess I kind of wanted to do that anyway."

Clarke smiles at this confession, a genuine smile that Lexa notes is really cute, which surprises Lexa because cute isn't a word that she has associated with this fierce, headstrong girl before. But now that she sees the cuteness, she doesn't think she'll ever be able to unsee it.

The smile quickly turns mischievous.

"I told you I'd corrupt you," grins Clarke.

In a move that surprises even herself, Lexa is the one to surge forwards this time, pressing her lips to Clarke's again insistently, if slightly sloppily. Clarke seems taken aback when their lips first collide, letting out a little noise that Lexa thinks might be engrained in her memory forever, but then she sighs into the kiss and starts responding with more fervour. Her lips burn against Lexa’s, and her taste is intoxicating, the flavours from the recently devoured pizza masking the more deeply engrained taste of what Lexa presumes is pot, but it’s just so inherently Clarke. Lexa loses herself in the kiss, and she prays to unknown deities that her natural instinct is right, because the way that Clarke is consuming her every fibre means that she doesn’t really get a chance to process what she’s doing at all beyond the fact that Clarke’s lips feel pretty damn good against her own.

Clarke is an eager kisser, perhaps more eager than Lexa, who despite being very much into this kiss, realises that she is about as clueless as to what comes next as she was about kissing in general five minutes ago. But Clarke seems to know the answer to that question, because soon the kissing isn’t enough. Clarke’s hand grapples at Lexa’s waist through the thin cotton of her shirt, a touch that scalds her in the most enjoyable ways. Lexa sighs contentedly, and Clarke smirks triumphantly against her mouth, and then before Lexa even has time to comprehend what Clarke is doing, she finds herself on her back on the couch, Clarke hovering above her with a single firm hand resting over her clothed breast.

“Clarke,” Lexa groans in pleasure, as the blonde’s lips latch onto the sharp line of Lexa’s jaw.

The barely coherent mumble of Clarke’s name seems to only spur Clarke on further, and the hand covering Lexa’s breast gives a gentle squeeze, tearing another uncontrollable moan from the back of Lexa’s throat.

It is with this action, however, that Lexa realises exactly where she is; which is to say that she becomes distinctly aware that Clarke’s hand is groping her breast, admittedly still over her clothes, but there’s no doubt that Clarke’s intention is to go further. The kind of further which Lexa has never been before, which she’s barely dreamed of going, and she immediately finds herself worrying about the sheer lack of experience she seems to have in comparison to Clarke, whose hand definitely knows exactly what it’s doing.

“Clarke…” Lexa says again, more articulately than before.

Clarke interprets the word as an encouragement, which Lexa isn’t entirely convinced that it’s not, but the startling realisation is that she’s possibly well on her way to losing her virginity to a girl that she barely knows on a couch while her parents are away on a business trip. As thrilling as the feeling of Clarke’s lips are against the base of her neck, it just doesn’t feel quite right anymore.

“Clarke,” Lexa says for a third time, using one of her hands to push at Clarke’s shoulder until the blonde gets the idea and lifts her body up and removes her hand from Lexa’s breast.

Lexa’s first thought when she looks up at Clarke, is that it’s painfully obvious from her dishevelled hair, rumpled clothes and swollen lips that she’s just been making out with someone. As Lexa sits up, she pats vaguely at her own hair, attempting to flatten in somewhat so that she doesn’t look quite so unkempt herself.

_Clarke looks like that because of me_ , Lexa thinks, and as soon as that thought crosses her mind, she almost wishes that she hadn’t put a halt to their making out, that she hadn’t stopped Clarke’s hands from doing unspeakable things to her as they roamed across previously unexplored areas of Lexa’s body.

“Are you okay?” Clarke tentatively asks, bringing Lexa’s attention back to the reason why she is no longer attached to Clarke by the lips.

“Yes,” nods Lexa. She frowns, and then adds, “Just a bit … it’s all so _fast_. I’ve never really … you know, before.”

Clarke’s eyes widen momentarily, but then the surprise is gone and she’s nodding understandably.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, her eyes glancing down to the floor in guilt.

“Don’t be,” Lexa insists. “I … I liked it. It was just getting a bit much.”

Clarke nods again, but she doesn’t say anything. The silence between them is an uncomfortable one and Lexa wishes she could do anything to get rid of the tension, even if that means pulling Clarke back down on top of her and guiding Clarke’s hand back to her chest.

The moment for that has gone though, and Lexa isn’t quite brave enough to initiate it again.

“I should put all this in the trash,” Lexa mumbles, avoiding making eye contact with Clarke as she collects up the pizza boxes and dips, before hurrying away into the kitchen.

She takes far longer than necessary, meticulously unfolding the cardboard until it sits flat and can fit in the plastic box used to store the recycling, then sorting through the pots of dips to work out which ones still have enough sauce left in them to keep and which ones can go straight into the trash can. Even then, when everything is in its proper place, Lexa dawdles around the kitchen, trying to ignore the way her mind is screaming _you just kissed a girl_ at her over and over again, as if the tingling in her lips and the hammering over her heart against her ribcage isn’t enough of a reminder.

Taking a deep breath to calm her nerves, Lexa returns to the living room to find Clarke perching on the edge of the sofa, her phone in her hand, and Lexa knows the gist of what Clarke is going to say next before the blonde even opens her mouth.

"My friend Octavia just texted," says Clarke. "I'm supposed to be saying at hers tonight and she's wondering when I'll be there."

"You have to go," Lexa concludes, trying not to let herself feel too disappointed.

Clarke nods and then gets to her feet, stepping into her heavy boots and kneeling to do up the laces. Lexa just stands there and watches her, slightly dumbstruck at the rapid progression of events tonight and desperately wanting to think of something to say that will make Clarke stay for just a moment longer. But the same voice that moments ago was reminding her that Clarke’s mouth had felt very nice against her own, now tells her that if Clarke wanted to stay, she wouldn’t let this Octavia person drag her away from Lexa.

“So,” says Clarke, as she stands up once more and slips her arms into her leather jacket, then picks up her backpack from the floor.

They stand there awkwardly beside the couch that just minutes ago, they were making out on top of.

“Yes,” says Lexa, because she can’t think of anything else to say.

“I should go,” Clarke reminds Lexa.

“Of course.”

Lexa tries not to hurry away down the hallway towards the front door to quickly, not wanting to seem too eager to get Clarke out of her house. She’s torn, part of her wanting Clarke to leave so that Lexa can be alone and attempt to get her head around tonight’s events, the other part of her wanting Clarke to stay for more desperate kisses.

“I guess I’ll see you around,” says Clarke.

The blonde turns to face Lexa as they stand beside the open front door, ignorant of the chilly breeze that drifts in from outside. Steely blue eyes, filled with both a familiar warmth and an unnerving iciness, flicker up to meet Lexa’s gaze, and Lexa is rendered breathless. She thinks that maybe kissing Clarke is the password to unlock the rest of Clarke’s secrets, because what was once an impassive stare is now filled with so much; a hint of longing, a burst of affection and, to Lexa’s chagrin, a glimmer of regret.

Clarke’s tongue darts out briefly and her eyes drop to Lexa’s lips, and then without any warning at all, she leans in again as if to kiss Lexa once more. Lexa’s breath catches in her throat, she _almost_ closes her eyes to wait for the impact, but Clarke seems to remember something after half a second, because she stops before their lips can meet and takes a step back, eyes looking anywhere but Lexa.

“I’m going now,” Clarke announces slightly stupidly, before stepping out through the front door.

“Goodbye!” Lexa calls after Clarke.

“Thanks for the pizza!” Lexa hears Clarke shout out in response.

Lexa hates the stupid part of her that hopes it’s not just the pizza that Clarke is thanking her for.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Come and find me on [tumblr](http://almostafantasia.tumblr.com).
> 
> Once again thanks go to [onemilliongoldstars](http://onemilliongoldstars.tumblr.com) for reading this and being generally fab. And thank you to everyone who said nice things about the last chapter, it means a lot.

Lexa doesn't see Clarke at the bus stop for two weeks after the kiss.

She tries not to feel too disappointed every time she arrives at the bus stop to find it void of familiar blonde hair hanging over leather clad shoulders and blue eyes that glare out at the world with a burning sense of realism. Lexa tells herself that Clarke probably just had math last period and bunked off school. There's no way that Clarke would be deliberately avoiding the bus stop at around the time school ends.

Lexa also tells herself that if Clarke is avoiding the bus stop because of her, there's no reason for her to feel disappointed. It was only one kiss, after all.

But that thought does nothing to calm the restless feeling in Lexa's gut that only intensifies with each day that Clarke is absent from the bus stop.

In Clarke’s absence, very little else changes. The number thirty eight bus remains as predictable as ever; the same journey, the same drivers, the same passengers. Lexa’s entire life continues much the way that it always has. Much that way that she’s always wanted it to.

Until she felt the touch of a pair of intoxicating lips against her own., the feel of soft blonde hair between her fingers, the taste on a tongue that could only belong to one person.

Lexa doesn’t think her life has been the same since.

* * *

But of course as soon as Lexa stops looking for Clarke at the bus stop is when she is once again there.

Lexa almost misses her at first. She's grown so accustomed to Clarke's absence that she doesn't think to check for her as she approaches the bus stop. It's a little more crowded on the sidewalk than usual, and trying to politely make her way through the mob with her satchel over one shoulder, her gym bag over the other and a heavy binder clutched tightly to her chest doesn't put Lexa in a particularly good mood anyway.

Until she spots a glimpse of blonde out of the corner of her eye. Lexa's head snaps up suddenly, though she mentally prepares herself to be disappointed because the blonde girls at the bus stop never seem to be Clarke these days.

Except that this time it _is_ her.

Excitement washes over Lexa for a total of about half a second, until it is replaced by a horrible sinking feeling, as Lexa notices that Clarke isn't alone today.

There are three of them, including Clarke, and the two rowdy brunettes that flank the blonde increase Clarke's own intimidation factor tenfold. Lexa thinks that she recognises the two other girls, having seen them hang out with Clarke at the bus stop before Lexa met her properly. They're both louder than Clarke, smoking something that looks suspiciously like it might not be legal, and generally causing a bit of a ruckus at the bus stop.

It's Clarke that Lexa watches intently though, as she approaches the bus stop where the three lean intimidatingly against a low wall. Clarke laughs along with them, jostling around with the other two as they make jokes that Lexa is too far away to hear, accepting the joint and placing it between her own lips to take a long drag.

Lexa realises abruptly that she doesn't really know Clarke at all. The Clarke that she sees in front of her is definitely not the Clarke that Lexa has invited into her home twice. That Clarke has been reserved, caged within a self-constructed wall of defence mechanisms. That Clarke had only opened up a little bit, and only after being given the promise of pizza, to reveal a gentler, caring, and dare Lexa say _vulnerable_ young girl with a wicked sense of humour. That Clarke had not been the raucous, marijuana-smoking hooligan that Lexa sees before her right now.

Lexa doesn't know what to do, as she approaches the bus stop where the trio stand. She's not entirely sure if there's even an etiquette for how to behave around a stranger turned first kiss partner who is hanging out with other friends. With other infinitely cooler friends.

Lexa decides that she's going to ignore Clarke, or at least just pretend not to have seen her, but just as she's passing the three girls on the sidewalk, Clarke's head snaps up mid laugh, the joint caught casually between her teeth, and her eyes meet Lexa's. Bluer than Lexa remembers, they stare at her for a millisecond that feels like an hour, recognition passing through them only momentarily, before a distant gaze clouds over her irises.

"Hey," Lexa greets her, changing her mind at the last minute, which means that the result sounds less like a word and more of a garbled mess.

Oh _great_. Now Clarke's friends are both staring at her too, identical frowns beneath furrowed brows that make Lexa fear that one of them is going to whip a knife out from beneath the layers of leather and hold it to her throat until she backs away.

"Do you know her, Clarke?" asks one of the girls.

Lexa drops her gaze from Clarke's and speeds up her pace, clutching the binder even closer to her body as she scurries away and perches on the wall away from the three girls, though still close enough to hear their conversation.

"We've only spoken like twice," shrugs Clarke casually, passing the joint to one of her friends. "She's just some kid from that stuck up girls' school."

Clarke makes it sound as if the two have interacted with only the most basic of pleasantries between strangers, perhaps an ' _Excuse me but you dropped this_ ' or a ‘ _Sorry, but I don't suppose you know what time the number twenty three bus will be here_ '. Clarke says nothing of their extended conversations, nothing of the two hundred dollars that Lexa attempted to leave with her, nothing of the fact that Clarke has visited Lexa's house not once, but twice.

Nothing of the kiss.

In Clarke's defence, Lexa doesn't blame her for not mentioning the kiss. Lexa hasn't told the friends she has at school about it either. She always thought that her first kiss would be a hugely significant moment, like they make it out to be in the movies, and that she would go into school the next day bursting with excitement to tell all of her friends what had taken place. But Lexa hadn't felt anything of the sort. Instead, the sense of unease she feels at the thought of telling her friends about Clarke makes Lexa even more determined to keep those goings on to herself.

She knows that it won't bother her friends that her first kiss was with a girl. It would be hypocritical if they were opposed to it, as Lexa knows that Anya had a brief thing with a girl in the year above during last semester, and nobody had batted an eyelid to that. She's more worried that her friends will find fault with the fact that her first kiss was with a homeless girl from the local high school who smokes pot and swears without abandon. At least Anya’s girl had been the daughter of a rich businessman in the city.

Unable to help herself, Lexa glances back over to the three girls, wistfully hoping to find Clarke looking back at her, but it's actually one of the others looking her way.

"Oi, nerd! What are you staring at?" bellows one of the brunettes, startling the people closest to the little group, and causing a few others further away to frown and shake their heads.

Lexa wishes that the sidewalk would just open up and swallow her whole. But it doesn't, so she settles for blushing a deep red colour and attempting to blend into the wall instead. The girl must see Lexa's attempt to cower away from them, because she lets out a snort and then speaks again, not directly to Lexa, but obviously loud enough that she knows Lexa will hear.

"She probably has a massive crush on you, Clarke."

"Yeah, probably," Lexa hears Clarke mumble in response.

"Wouldn't surprise me," adds the third girl. "She is at Lesbian High School."

Lexa keeps her head held high and tries not to give any indication that she's heard the three girls, nor that their words are cutting into her like a thousand tiny blades and twisting at her insides painfully. She can cope with the harsh words from the two brunettes. She's used to the local kids giving her a second glance because of her uniform, to people labelling her as posh when she gets on the bus just because of which school she goes to. She's even heard the highly fabricated and obviously untrue rumours that everyone in her school must be a lesbian simply because it's an all-girl school. None of that affects her as much as Clarke's behaviour; the fact that Clarke refuses to even acknowledge that they are more than just strangers at a bus stop, the fact that Clarke does nothing to stop her friends from stereotyping and bullying Lexa in the way that everybody else does.

Lexa's eyes sting with the threat of prickling tears and she blinks several times to fight them back, reminding herself that Clarke is nothing but a stranger to her, that Clarke’s opinion of her doesn’t matter at all, that she never expected or hoped that anything more would come of their kiss because a girl with no home and no future prospects is hardly girlfriend material at all.

She tries _not_ to remember that all those things are lies.

Lexa’s bus arrives and she climbs aboard with flushed cheeks, a lump in her throat, and a huge empty space in her chest. When she sits down in an empty double seat near the back of the bus, she leans her head against the window and cries for the first time in years.

* * *

Another week passes. Lexa doesn't even bother looking for Clarke at the bus stop. She tells herself that she doesn't even notice the other girl's absence.

(Oh, but she does.)

* * *

Sometimes Lexa misses her usual bus because she has to stay late after school. It's a price that she's more than willing to pay for all of the extracurriculars that she's involved in. When it's not an extra hockey training, it's the school newspaper, and when it's not the newspaper, there's an additional swim practice scheduled. Lexa finds herself staying later than the final bell at least once a week, if not twice.

On this particular Thursday, Lexa has to get the later bus because of an extra orchestra rehearsal that her music teacher had called after deeming the run of the music they're due to play at the school concert in two weeks “an atrocity”. The rehearsal dragged on at a torturously slow pace and Lexa finds previously fun music mind-numbingly dull now that they’ve spent an hour and a half picking it apart almost note by note. If she wasn’t the leader of her section and trying to stay in the music teacher’s good books, and a little more daring, she probably would have got up and left midway through the rehearsal.

 _Clarke would have left_ , Lexa finds herself thinking, but she immediately reminds herself that Clarke probably would have knocked over a music stand or two in frustration and given the music teacher the middle finger as she’d left the room. Perhaps Clarke’s hypothetical example is not one that Lexa should be seeking to follow.

Lexa immediately scolds herself for even thinking of Clarke. As she had lain awake in bed a few hours after she last saw Clarke, a few hours after she’d cried because of the words and actions of Clarke and her friends, Lexa had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t waste another second of her life thinking of Clarke.

Lexa is shattered, both in mind and in body. She wants nothing more than to get a decent meal inside her and to spend the evening curled up in bed with a steaming mug of tea and a good book that she could get lost in for hours. But to do that she first needs to get home, which is why she finds herself staggering the familiar route out of the school gates and beyond with the heavy weight of the instrument case on her back. She deposits the case on the sidewalk as soon as she makes it to the bus stop, sighing with relief and rolling her shoulders out to rid herself of the stiffness in the muscles there.

The rehearsal has drained it all out of her. She’s _exhausted_.

So exhausted, in fact, that she doesn't notice Clarke sidle over to her and slouch against the wall next to her at the bus stop until the blonde opens her mouth to speak to Lexa.

"Nice guitar."

Lexa stiffens at the sound of the familiar voice, remembering the harsh words of Clarke's friends last time they were both here and the way that Clarke did absolutely nothing to prevent their verbal assault on Lexa.

"It's a cello," Lexa replies stiffly, instinctively reaching a protective hand out to rest it on the hard plastic shell of her cello case.

Clarke seems momentarily thrown off balance by Lexa's response, though she quickly regains her composure.

"Of course it is."

Lexa is saved from future interactions by the screech of brakes as her bus pulls up at the stop. Without even sparing Clarke a glance, Lexa hoists her cello case up onto her shoulders once more and trudges across the sidewalk to get on the bus, fiddling around in her bag to find the change needed for her fare.

"Bye, Lexa!" Clarke calls out, just before the doors on the bus hiss shut behind Lexa.

Lexa says nothing. She doesn't think that Clarke even deserves a response.

* * *

When Lexa arrives at the bus stop after school the next day, Clarke is already there. She doesn’t have her earphones in blasting music, or her hood pulled up over her blonde locks, or any of the other defence mechanisms she uses to ward the rest of the world out, but is instead anxiously hopping from foot to foot, apparently awaiting Lexa’s arrival with eager intentions.

“Hey Lexa,” says Clarke. “How was school?”

It’s the most voluntarily talkative that Lexa has ever seen Clarke, and her own feelings of animosity towards the blonde make it seem as if their original roles are reversed, that Clarke is the one keen to be friends and Lexa is the one treating the world with hostility.

“It was fine,” Lexa replies, her voice hard-edged and cold.

“Great,” Clarke nods. “It kind of sucked for me. I had a history test which I probably flunked and then I actually went to math for a change.”

Lexa tilts her head up to look at Clarke, and shoots her a glance as if to say _are you really doing this?_ She hopes that the look in her eyes will send Clarke the right message, because she really doesn’t want to let Clarke worm her way back in, she doesn’t want to give herself a chance to forgive Clarke for her behaviour last week. But Clarke stays exactly where she is, either not understanding that Lexa doesn’t want to talk to her, or simply choosing to ignore that fact.

Lexa’s bus cannot arrive fast enough.

“So I think I need to apologise to you,” Clarke ventures.

“You _think_ you need to apologise?” Lexa can hardly refrain herself from rolling her eyes.

Clarke hangs her head and frowns, not an angry frown or a confused frown, but just a frown filled with sadness, and it takes all of Lexa’s self-restrain not to give the blonde her own apology for the harshness of her previous words and forgive her on the spot.

“Okay, I need to apologise to you,” Clarke corrects her earlier statement, “for last week. I was out of order.”

Lexa swallows and stares straight ahead, almost as if she’s refusing to acknowledge Clarke’s words.

“Lexa,” pleads Clarke. “Lexa, _look_ at me.”

Managing to keep her gaze away from Clarke for only a few seconds longer, Lexa lets out an audible sigh of frustration and turns her head to look at Clarke, but in doing so, she spots the painted blue exterior of a bus with the familiar number thirty eight written in the lights above the windshield further down the road.

“My bus is here,” Lexa informs Clarke, gathering her things together and preparing to step forward to the edge of the sidewalk.

It’s Clarke’s turn to be frustrated and when she lets out a little grunt, Lexa is genuinely worried for half a second that Clarke might lash out at something, and that that something could end up being her. But as Lexa boards the bus, Clarke’s exasperation turns to desperation as she jogs across the sidewalk and climbs aboard the bus right behind Lexa, fishing out a fistful of coins and notes from the back pocket of her skinny jeans and depositing them in the driver’s hand. Lexa watches as he counts out the correct amount, returns the extra change, and then as Clarke traipses down the middle of the bus until she drops into the empty seat next to Lexa.

“If you’re mad at me because of what happened last week, I totally get it,” says Clarke, as the bus starts moving again with a lurch. “I was an asshole.”

Lexa lets out a soft snort and turns her head away from Clarke to look out through the grimy window.

“Listen,” Clarke continues, “my friends are even bigger assholes and I love them to bits, but I should have stood up for you.”

“Damn right you should have,” Lexa growls angrily.

Clarke sighs and pauses for a moment, before she says, “Look, it’s complicated. You probably wouldn’t get it.”

“No, I _do_ get it,” objects Lexa. “You’re one of the cool kids and I’m not. I understand, Clarke. I was stupid to think that the fact that you _kissed_ me meant anything at all.”

Lexa furrows her brow and blinks rapidly to clear her eyes of the tears that sting there, threatening to fall. A lump forms in her throat and she hates her body for betraying her like this. Lexa turns her head even further to face the window in an attempt to stop Clarke from seeing that she’s on the verge of breaking down into tears.

“Lexa, please,” begs Clarke. “It’s nothing like that. Raven and Octavia are like me.”

“What, you mean they’re backstabbing bitches too?”

Upon hearing Clarke’s sharp intake of breath, Lexa almost regrets her words. _Almost_.

“Okay, I deserved that,” Clarke admits. “What I mean is that those two are my family. The three of us stick together because we don’t really have anybody else.”

Confident that she’s no longer about to cry, Lexa turns to look at Clarke properly for the first time since she sat down on the bus beside Lexa.

“So are you ashamed of me because I’m _at that stuck up girls’ school_ ,” Lexa mimics the words that Clarke said to her friends last week, “or because I actually have a proper family?”

Clarke doesn’t answer. She simply stares at Lexa for a few moments with eyes that seem to have all the life drained out of them, then hangs her head in shame. Lexa interprets the action to mean an answer of yes to both parts of her question, and it hurts to know that Clarke has fallen into the trap of such petty prejudice. Lexa lets out a petulant sigh to let Clarke know just how disappointed she is.

“Lexa…” Clarke starts.

“I still haven’t heard that apology, Clarke.”

“I’m sorry, okay?” Clarke says, raising her voice just a little bit. “I apologise from the bottom of my heart for what I did last week. It was wrong. I know that and I’ve spent the last few days torturing myself over how I treated you because for some really dumb reason, despite the fact that you epitomise everything that I hate in this world, I actually quite like you. There. Are you happy now?”

Lexa waits a few seconds to give Clarke’s words time to resonate, not just in her own head but in Clarke’s too, before replying, much calmer than before, “Thank you for your apology.”

“I just want you to remember that I’m not like you, and that makes this,” Clarke gestures between them as if that is supposed to explain what _this_ is, “more difficult than what I’m used to.”

 _No_ , thinks Lexa. _I’m not like you at all. I don’t smoke weed, or blast my music so loud that it terrifies the dear old ladies at the bus stop, or treat my supposed friends like crap._ Five minutes ago Lexa would have voiced those thoughts to Clarke. Now, following Clarke’s apology, Lexa keeps them to herself.

“So,” says Clarke, filling the awkward void of silence that has fallen between them, “you play the cello?”

Lexa almost laughs aloud at what is clearly supposed to be Clarke’s attempt at getting to know Lexa, clinging onto the only real fact she knows about Lexa beyond her name and where she goes to school, and asking a question that she already knows that answer to. But Clarke _is_ at least trying, which is more than Lexa can say for all of their previous interactions, so she decides to humour Clarke just this once.

“Yes.”

“That’s cool,” says Clarke, and in her defence, she does at least sound like she’s pretending to be interested. “I’ve never really been musical myself. I used to want to play the drums, but my mom said no because it was too expensive and too noisy.”

Lexa notes that this is the most open Clarke has been about giving up information about herself. It’s also the first time that Clarke has mentioned a family member, and knowing what she does about the fact that Clarke doesn’t have a home of her own, she wonders what happened to this mom, but she knows better than to pry.

Instead, she just says, “Yeah, cello is a much quieter.”

“So do you play it at school?” Clarke asks. “Like in the band or something?”

“School orchestra,” Lexa corrects Clarke.

“Like classical music?”

Lexa inclines her head slightly, then answers, “Mostly. We play some movie soundtracks too. We’re playing a suite of music from Harry Potter in our concert in a couple of weeks.”

Clarke’s eyes meet Lexa’s, wide in recognition, and she says excitedly, “Oh I know that music. The one that goes like…”

Clarke starts humming vaguely under her breath, albeit an incredibly out of tune rendition of the familiar melody, but still recognisable.

“That’s the one,” Lexa nods.

“Are you playing anything else that I’d know?”

Lexa frowns and runs through the list of repertoire in her head, trying to work out if there are any that are famous enough to be recognisable to a self-proclaimed non-expert in music.

“I don’t think so,” Lexa shakes her head.

“Oh,” says Clarke, seemingly disappointed.

The silence that falls between them is palpable, and Lexa realises that Clarke must have exhausted all of her conversational powers in the last few minutes. She can almost hear the way that Clarke is mentally flailing, racking her brain for something to say, for _anything_ that she can use to continue this conversation and prove to Lexa that she does actually want to get to know her. Remembering Clarke’s apology, and deciding that the significant increase in effort that Clarke has put into their friendship (can Lexa call it a friendship yet?) today has earned a reward, Lexa helps her out.

“So,” she says, turning to look at Clarke and tilting her head slightly as she asks, “You actually went to math today?”

Lexa thinks that the little smile that spreads across Clarke’s lips when she realises that Lexa is no longer mad at her could probably light up the entire world.

* * *

Clarke gets off at Lexa’s stop ten minutes later and, realising that she doesn’t have enough change for the journey back home (or wherever it is that Clarke is calling home for the night), she looks up at Lexa with a sheepish grin on her face. She doesn’t have to speak, but Lexa knows what she’s asking and she doesn’t hesitate to reach into her bag for her wallet, from which she withdraws a ten dollar bill to give to Clarke.

“Get yourself some dinner too,” Lexa says, then adds as an afterthought, “Don’t spend it on pot.”

“Thanks, Lexa,” Clarke calls out as she starts to walk away, hands fisted deep within the pockets of her jacket. “See you around.”

“Goodbye Clarke.”

* * *

In hindsight, Lexa should perhaps have known that a reconciliation of her almost-friendship with Clarke could only do bad things for her mental state. And her heart. And her impeccable school record.

The problem is that she now thinks of Clarke _all the time_. She’ll see somebody in a leather jacket and immediately start thinking of how Clarke’s jacket looks much better on her. If she hears any kind of punk rock music, whether it’s on the radio or as background music in an advert or through the speakers in one of the shops in the mall, she automatically pictures Clarke slouched against the wall at the bus stop, earphones blasting this type of music loud enough for everyone else to be able to hear it too. When she sits in class solving mundane quadratic equation after quadratic equation, she thinks of the fact that Clarke simply chooses to bunk off school rather than put herself through this torture.

Perhaps the even bigger problem is that Clarke is doing absolutely nothing to encourage Lexa’s crush on her at all, which means that it is entirely Lexa’s own doing. Clarke’s schedule of being at the bus stop after school versus not being there remains as unpredictable as ever, and Lexa is slowly training herself to make the walk from school to the bus stop with low expectations just so that she is surprised on those rare occasions that Clarke does happen to be there.

Even when Lexa does arrive to find Clarke already waiting on the sidewalk beside the low wall, nothing much generally happens. Clarke will usually have her earphones in, or her two friends will be there with her (Lexa is pleased that Clarke acknowledges her presence with a tiny nod and gives her friends a rough shove in the side when they start sniggering in Lexa’s direction), or Clarke’s bus will arrive bang on time and cut their conversation short before they’ve had time to get through anything more than the most basic of pleasantries.

Despite that, Lexa still _lives_ for those moments. Just seeing Clarke for barely a couple of minutes twice a week is enough to keep her crush ignited.

Lexa thinks that might be the most pathetic thing of all.

What is perhaps worse than having a huge crush on Clarke, is having a huge crush on Clarke whilst knowing what Clarke’s mouth feels like against her own.

Of the time that Lexa spends thinking about Clarke, she would estimate that a solid sixty percent is spent replaying the kiss that she shared with the blonde. (Another ten to fifteen percent is spent imagining and reimagining what might have happened had Lexa not asked Clarke to stop, though even just admitting that to herself brings a furious blush to Lexa’s otherwise unblemished cheeks.)

It’s becoming a problem, especially when Lexa finds herself being called on by the teacher for not paying attention for the third time in a single day, though in her defence, imagining what kind of underwear Clarke would wear is definitely more interesting than learning to conjugate irregular Spanish verbs.

It’s becoming a problem, but Lexa’s still undecided on whether it’s becoming a problem that she actually wants to resolve. And when she pictures Clarke wearing nothing but a lacy lingerie set, Lexa thinks that she’s tipping slightly more towards an answer of _probably not_.

* * *

The day of Lexa’s concert arrives and she’s surprised by how nervous she is. Nerves aren’t normally a problem with her. She likes to think of herself as a reasonably competent cellist and besides, she’s part of a big section with other players to cover up her mistakes. Tonight however, is her first concert as the principal of the cello section which means that she’s not only supposed to be the best on her instrument, but she’s got nine other cellists watching and copying her every move. It’s a daunting prospect, not to mention the fact that the repertoire is making for one of their more challenging concerts.

Lexa stands in the dressing room while the concert band do their short program, her cello in one hand and her bow in the other. Her fingers dance across the strings at the top of the cello, silently going over the notes from a couple of tricky passages that she has memorised in preparation for the concert. It doesn’t do much to calm her nerves, but the familiarity of the movement at least reassures her that she knows she _can_ do it on a good day.

“Okay girls, it’s almost time to go on stage,” calls out the teacher. “Line up in the wings just like we practised earlier, and everybody remember their music. We don’t want a repeat of the trumpet incident from last Christmas.”

Lexa picks up the folder containing her music and follows the rest of her classmates out of the dressing room and into the backstage area. With the applause of the audience filling the whole auditorium, the concert band file off and the school orchestra makes their way onto the stage. Lexa finds her seat easily, and while the girl next to her sorts through their shared music to put it in order on the stand, Lexa glances out into the auditorium, squinting through the crowd to try and spot her parents. It’s pointless really, as the bright theatre lights flooding the stage make the auditorium so dark that most faces are indistinguishable, but just as Lexa concedes defeat and realises that she’s not going to work out where they are, her eyes catch on a glint of blonde.

A _familiar_ glint of blonde.

No. There’s no way that Clarke is in the audience. Absolutely no way at all.

Lexa looks back out into the audience, staring vaguely towards the area she thought she saw Clarke, in the hope of clearing up this confusion. At first she sees nothing, but then her eyes slowly adjust to the gloom of the main auditorium and a face swims out of the darkness, a face that though small, shares so many similarities with Clarke’s that it just _has_ to be her.

Which begs the question; what the _hell_ is Clarke doing at Lexa’s concert?

There isn’t time for her to ponder this further, as the conductor walks on stage and Lexa has to focus her mind on the music that they’re about to perform.

It’s strange though. The nerves that she felt before the concert began have gone, probably through adrenaline now that she is seated on the stage in front of a couple of hundred people ready to perform, but Lexa highly suspects that Clarke’s presence has something to do with that. Since the initial surprise of seeing the blonde amongst the faces in the audience, Lexa has felt oddly calm.

The conductor raises his baton, and as Lexa lifts her bow to her instruments and plays the first note, it along with every note that she plays afterwards is being played as if she and Clarke are the only two in the room.

* * *

After the concert, Lexa wanders into the school reception where parents and students mill around, the general thrum of excited chatter filling the air. Lexa gently pushes her way through the crowd with a series of murmurings of  _excuse me_ , eyes peeled for a blonde hair or a flash of leather.

It’s Clarke who finds Lexa. Fingers clasp around Lexa’s wrist, the warm touch taking her by surprise as they pull Lexa to the side, and then familiar blue eyes shine up at Lexa, a slow grin spreading across the blonde’s face.

“Hey,” she says.

“Clarke!” Lexa exclaims. “I thought I saw you in the audience.” It’s kind of a lie. Lexa _knew_ that Clarke was there, and then she could have sworn that she could feel Clarke’s eyes burning into the side of her head throughout the entire concert. “What are you doing here?”

“You mentioned that you had a concert so I looked it up on the school website and decided to come and watch.”

Clarke says it as if it is no big deal, but it is to Lexa. This is possibly the most proactive that she’s seen Clarke, who is usually so full of indifferent shrugs and fierce scowls, and Lexa feels her heart burst with affection for the fact that Clarke made a conscious decision to come to something that she has very little personal interest in, something that she knew Lexa to be passionate about.

In fact, it all makes Lexa want to kiss Clarke, and perhaps she would, were she not standing in a crowded area with many of her friends and teachers just feet away from them.

“Lexa, dear. There you are!”

In a crowded area with her _parents_.

Lexa lifts her head and smiles at her approaching parents, letting her mother place a kiss on her forehead and returning her father’s jovial wave. Lexa’s mom turns to Clarke, then looks back at Lexa as if awaiting an introduction, but it is Clarke who gets there first, holding out her hand first to Lexa’s mom, then to her dad.

"Hello! You must be Lexa's parents. I'm Clarke, Lexa's friend."

Lexa almost chokes on her own tongue. Never before has she heard Clarke sound so cheerful, and the polite edge to her voice is nothing of the brusque tone she normally uses. And the smile on her face too; Lexa can tell that Clarke is putting the smile on for Lexa’s parents, but only because she’s so used to Clarke’s bitter scowls and occasional teasing little smirks.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Clarke,” Lexa’s mom says.

"Oh no, the pleasure is all mine."

Lexa almost wonders if Clarke has had a personality transplant.

"Lexa, why don’t you give your cello to your dad?” Lexa’s mom suggests, and her dad immediately steps forward obediently to take the case from his daughter’s back. Lexa’s mom turns back to Clarke, and says, “It's lovely to see one of Lexa's friends supporting her at something like this. Have you been to any of her concerts before?"

"No, this is actually my first time,” Clarke is quick to answer. “I'm not much of a musician myself, in fact the opposite really. I'm pretty tone deaf, to be quite honest.” This elicits a small laugh from Lexa’s mom which, from the look in Clarke’s eyes, is the desired effect, and Lexa forces her own lips up into a little smile too. “But I heard Lexa talking about how excited she was for this concert and thought it would be a nice surprise to come and watch."

Lexa has to give Clarke credit. Despite never having met Lexa’s mom before, she seems to know exactly what to say to charm her way into her good books, though Lexa isn’t too sure to what extent that is a good thing.

"Oh how lovely!” Lexa’s mom beams, then gives Lexa a look as if to say _aren’t you lucky to have a friend like Clarke?_ “So then, Clarke, if it isn't music that you're involved in, what is your thing?"

"I'm much more into the visual arts,” replies Clarke. “I love to draw and paint."

"Oh wow, that is interesting!” Lexa’s mom enthuses. “Is that just a hobby or do you hope to make a career out of it?"

"I'd actually love to become a professional artist. Obviously it's a very difficult field to get into, but it's been a dream of mine since I was much younger to be an art major at college."

Lexa’s mom turns her attention to her daughter, and Lexa knows exactly what her mom is going to pester her about before she even opens her mouth.

"See Lexa, your friend Clarke knows what she wants to do in college,” nags Lexa’s mom. “I keep telling you that you should start thinking about it for yourself."

"Mom..." whines Lexa, not wishing to get into the debate that they must have at least twice weekly, especially not here and _definitely_ not in front of Clarke.

"Lexa still has plenty of time,” Clarke interjects helpfully, shooting another charming smile in Lexa’s mom’s direction.

"It's never too early to start thinking about these things, Lexa,” Lexa’s mom reminds her, before returning her attention to the blonde. “So Clarke, what are the art provisions like at this school?"

Lexa’s eyes widen in horror as she realises that her parents have made the mistake of assuming that Clarke is one of Lexa’s classmates, and panic washes over her like a tidal wave. She wants to step in and say something to save Clarke, to say anything that would divert the conversation anywhere but here, but her throat dries up and she can’t make her mouth form any words at all. _This is it_ , Lexa thinks to herself. _This is the moment that everything comes crashing down_. Clarke will have no choice but to confess that she’s not a student at the school, and then Lexa’s parents will find out that her new friend is a homeless stranger that she met on the street, and Lexa will get grounded for months for going against everything they ever taught her about personal safety.

Clarke, however, takes it all in her stride.

"They're pretty good, actually,” she replies without hesitation. “Obviously the school has a reputation for being good academically so you might assume that there's less focus when it comes to less academic subjects. But I've found that if you have a passion for something like art, the teachers respond to that. I've never had a problem with getting resources and feedback from my art teacher."

Lexa tries not to let her mouth gape open at the ease with which Clarke pretty much lies through her teeth, hoping that her surprise can’t be seen on her face.

“That’s wonderful!” Lexa’s mom gushes. “The school has one of the highest success rates of Ivy League applicants in the state but I think it’s fantastic that the teachers are willing to support you in your dreams to become an artist. Back in my day the teachers were only willing to offer support if you wanted to go in one of a few academically driven directions, but I’m so glad that the school is becoming more progressive and inclusive whilst still maintaining its high standards. Lexa’s dad and I both took the law school route, but we always tell Lexa that we’ll support her in whatever direction she chooses to take her life, as long as she’s happy.”

“Well Lexa is one of the smartest people I know,” says Clarke, shooting a smile in Lexa’s direction. “She’s incredibly hardworking. I bet she could do anything she set her mind to.”

Lexa can see her mom almost bursting with pride at this comment. Glancing across at Clarke, she wonders how sincere the blonde’s words actually are, whether her honest opinion of Lexa is that she’s smart enough to achieve any possible ambition, or if she’s just saying that in her quest to suck up to Lexa’s parents.

“Yes, I think so too,” beams Lexa’s mom. “Lexa has always been very focused and I have no doubt that she’ll do her best and make us proud no matter what she chooses to do.”

“I _am_ still here, you know,” Lexa reminds them both, feeling slightly uncomfortable about the way they are discussing her as if she isn’t standing right beside them.

Lexa is saved from any further embarrassment, and from all future near heart attacks that she might incur from having to watch Clarke lie about their entire friendship just to please Lexa’s mom, by the buzzing of Clarke’s cell phone. She watches as Clarke takes the phone from her jacket pocket and lifts it to her ear.

“Bellamy? You’re outside? Great, I’ll be there in a sec. Bye.”

Clarke pockets her phone once more and then turns to look at Lexa’s mom again.

“It’s been really nice to meet you,” Clarke says, all charm and polite smiles once more, “but my lift is here so I’m going to have to go now.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” replies Lexa’s mom. “We should be heading off too. It was lovely to talk to you, Clarke. I’m sure we’ll meet again sometime.”

 _Definitely not_ , thinks Lexa. There’s no way that she’s letting Clarke be in the same room as her mother again.

“Oh definitely!” Clarke nods enthusiastically. “See you, Lexa.”

“Bye, Clarke.”

Clarke raises her arm and wiggles her fingers in the smallest of waves, then shoves both hands into the pockets of her jacket and turns away, disappearing into the crowd of people still gathered in the school hallway. As soon as the blonde is out of sight, Lexa’s mom turns her full attention to her daughter for the first time since she met Clarke.

“Isn’t Clarke _lovely_ , Lexa?” Lexa’s mom smiles in delight, as if meeting Clarke has been the highlight of her year. “I don’t recall you ever mentioning her before though.”

“She’s quite a new friend,” Lexa shrugs, dancing as close to the truth as she can without revealing Clarke’s earlier lies to her mom.

“And she’s already been to one of your concerts?”

Lexa almost wonders if it’s possible for her mom to explode from sheer happiness, because it certainly seems like that might be about to happen.

Lexa’s mom continues, “I’ve never seen Anya or Indra or any of the other girls you’re friends with come to your concerts.”

“They’re probably just busy,” Lexa lies.

As they step out of the main school entrance into the brisk night air, Lexa spots Clarke crossing the parking lot just in front of them. Contemplating everything that has just taken place between her mother and Clarke, Lexa makes a spur of the moment decision and turns to her mom.

“Mom, do you mind if I just go and talk to her for a second? I was going to ask her about an assignment earlier but I forgot.”

“Of course, honey. We’ll just wait in the car.”

Lexa breaks into a light jog to catch up with Clarke, putting her hand on the blonde’s shoulder as soon as she’s close enough to get the other girl to turn around.

“What were you thinking, saying all that stuff to my mom like that?” demands Lexa, fury bubbling within her like an angry volcano getting ready to erupt, though she deliberately keeps her voice low in fear that her parents will be able to hear them arguing form across the parking lot.

"I was just being nice,” Clarke says defensively. “I think she likes me.”

Lexa can hardly refrain herself from rolling her eyes at just how completely oblivious Clarke is to how much she’s messed up everything.

"It's all very well being nice to my parents, but there's being nice and then there's lying to their faces,” Lexa shakes her head in disapproval. “What was all that about wanting to study art at college?"

Clarke’s face contorts into an angry scowl.

"Fuck you, Lexa,” she spits venomously. “That was all true. I've always wanted to be an artist."

Lexa lets herself be surprised at this new discovery only momentarily, before the anger overwhelms her again and she fights back with a snappy retort.

"You barely turn up to school! How are you ever going to get into college?"

Clarke hesitates, and Lexa realises that she may have hit upon the truth a little _too_ hard there.

"Okay,” Clarke admits, “so maybe I fabricated the truth slightly."

"Fabricated the truth?” scoffs Lexa, with an accompanying roll of her eyes. “You had my mother believing that you're a pupil here! I'm surprised she even bought that one."

"You think the idea of me being at this school is ridiculous?" demands Clarke, her eyebrows raised.

"Well, yes!” nods Lexa. “I mean, look at you."

Lexa gestures to Clarke, to her ripped skinny jeans and scruffy combat boots and the leather jacket. She can’t really imagine any of the girls at her school dressing in such clothes, even the slightly rebellious cooler crowd dress in a way that shows off their parents’ wealth.

"Fuck you,” Clarke hurls the words at Lexa so viciously that Lexa almost has to take a step backwords. “You shouldn't be so quick to judge. Do you want to know why I had such an easy job convincing your parents that I'm a student here? I know exactly what it's like to be the posh little rich girl in the prissy uniform because I used to go here.”

Clarke’s words leave Lexa stunned, frozen to the spot with her mouth hanging slightly open and her eyebrows knit together in confusion as she tries to process them. So stunned, in fact, that by the time the words have fully sunk in, Clarke is already several paces away and climbing into the passenger side of a big rusty truck clumsily parked across two spaces in the lot.

“Clarke, wait!”

Lexa wonders if Clarke is really going to leave her here with those words and no further explanation, but when the truck’s loud engine kicks into life and it’s curly haired driver begins to edge the vehicle forwards, Lexa has to accept that she isn’t going to get any further answer and moves out of the way to let the truck pass.

As Lexa watches the truck go through the school gates and pull out onto the main road, Clarke’s words ring as clearly in her mind as they did when she spoke them.

 _I used to go here_.

Lexa realises that she doesn’t know Clarke at all.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has stuck with this story, especially those of you who have left me lovely comments. An extra special thanks goes to [onemilliongoldstars](http://onemilliongoldstars.tumblr.com), without whom this story would probably just be another forgotten document on my computer. Go and check out her writing too and send her some love.

Lexa doesn’t sleep at all that night. Clarke’s words resonate in her mind on repeat, like a stuck record that just keeps replaying the same five seconds over and over again.

_I used to go here._

Lexa tries to picture Clarke as a student at her school. She closes her eyes and lets an image of Clarke’s face swim into her mind, blue eyes gleaming brightly and blonde curls pushed back off her face. She tries to place Clarke in her school uniform; grey skirt falling to her knees, a tie knotted around her neck beneath the collar of a crisp white button up shirt, slightly oversized navy blazer with the school crest sewn onto the pocket. But it just doesn’t feel right.

Of course Clarke would probably have been one of the ‘cool’ girls, adjusting her skirt so that it barely covers the essentials, her collar open to display her cleavage and her tie hanging loosely in a manner that goes against all uniform regulations. Yes, Clarke would be one of those girls, the popular ones who turn up late to class because they think it makes them cool and smoke cigarettes at lunchtime behind the bleachers where the teachers can’t find them, but that still manage to remain the teachers’ favourites because their excessively rich parents are on the school’s governing body.

It still doesn’t seem very Clarke though. No matter how hard she tries, Lexa just can’t seem to shake the eyeliner and the leather jacket and the sullen attitude from the image of Clarke that she has in her head.

_I used to go here._

_Used_ to go here. As in Clarke doesn’t go to Lexa’s school anymore. But Lexa already knew that. It’s the fact that Clarke ever went there at all that Lexa is having difficulty wrapping her brain around.

And what kind of series of events has to take place for someone to go from a private schoolgirl at one of the highest performing schools in the state, to being homeless? Lexa doesn’t even want to think about what kind of terrible things Clarke must have gone through to make that kind of spectacular downfall.

_I used to go here._

It just doesn’t make any sense at all.

* * *

“Hey, can I borrow twenty dollars?”

Lexa does a double take and almost doesn’t believe that it is Clarke who casually wanders over to her at the bus stop, not only because the two of them haven’t spoken since their argument in the parking lot outside Lexa’s school, but because it’s the first time that Lexa has ever heard Clarke explicitly ask to borrow money.

She considers Clarke’s request for only the briefest of moments, because despite the argument that they ended their last encounter with, it would be a lie to say that she doesn’t think of Clarke all the time, that she doesn’t think of Clarke’s homelessness when she’s indulging in her mother’s cooking or climbing into her big warm bed at night.

“Okay.”

Pulling a twenty dollar bill out of her wallet, Lexa hands the note to Clarke.

“Thanks,” Clarke murmurs softly as she accepts the money. Tilting her head to the side slightly, Clarke asks, “Hey, do you want to grab dinner with me? I’m paying!”

Clarke waves the newly acquired money in the air as she shoots Lexa a wicked grin, and Lexa tries to ignore the little backflip that her heart does, because despite Clarke’s invitation she has to remind herself that it’s definitely not a date. Yet Clarke just has something about her that reduces Lexa to a puddle of nerves every single time.

“Yes,” agrees Lexa.

“Great,” beams Clarke. “We can get the bus into town and find somewhere to eat. I … um, I want to explain everything to you and I thought we could do it over dinner.”

Lexa swallows thickly and then nods her head.

“Let me just text my mom to tell her where I’m going.”

Clarke nods and leans back against the wall, picking up the earbud that is hanging from the thin wire at her neck and pushing it back into her ear, as Lexa pulls her phone out of her back and taps away at the screen.

_Can I go and get dinner with Clarke tonight?_

Lexa can at least take comfort in the fact that her mother will be delighted that she’s spending time with “a good influence like Clarke”. Her mom’s words, not hers. It honestly does make Lexa laugh. If only her mom knew about Clarke’s foul mouth, or perhaps her pot-smoking tendencies, or the fact that she skives off school on the regular.

The reply from her mom is almost instant.

_Ok honey. Say hi to Clarke for me._

* * *

Clarke looks at the menu as if she hasn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks which, Lexa reaches the gut-wrenching conclusion, may actually be the case. Regardless, Lexa is worried for a moment that Clarke’s eyes are filled with such a hunger that she may just devour the menu itself and have done with it.

“What are you going to have?” Clarke asks, blue eyes alive with excitement as they flicker up from the menu to look at Lexa across the table.

Scanning the menu in front of her quickly, Lexa says, “I don’t know, a wrap maybe? Or the barbecue chicken, that looks nice.”

“I think I might just go for the burger,” Clarke says thoughtfully. “Boring, I know, but it’s been a while since I had one.”

“Hey girls, what can I get for you?” asks a waitress, pulling a small notebook and a pencil out of the pocket on the front of her apron as she approaches their table.

They place their orders quickly, and Lexa smiles to herself when she sees the way that Clarke’s eyes light up when she learns that there are unlimited refills on soda. The waitress disappears momentarily and returns with their drinks, then when she tells them that their meals will be along shortly, Clarke finally turns her attention back to Lexa.

“So I owe you an explanation,” says Clarke, taking a sip from her drink and then placing the glass back down on the table, looking at Lexa with a serious expression on her face.

“Yes,” agrees Lexa with a curt nod.

“I realise I was probably a little bit harsh the last time we spoke,” Clarke admits. “You knew that … you knew about my current situation and I had never given you a reason to believe that I was once like you.”

Lexa nods and swallows, then says stiffly, “And I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions about you based on the small amount of personal information you had chosen to share with me. That was hypocritical of me, especially knowing how much I hate to be judged based on something like my school uniform.”

“Apology accepted,” Clarke nods in acknowledgement.

There’s a moment of silence between the two of them, a moment which seems to solidify the truce that now falls between them, then Clarke seems to remember that she has an explanation to give and starts talking again.

“Okay,” she begins, “so I don’t really know how to properly explain everything, but I’m going to start with my freshman year of high school. I was fourteen. Life was kind of great really. I had everything I could have ever wanted. Mom was a doctor, Dad was an engineer, and they could afford to send me to the fancy girls’ school so they did.”

“I don’t remember you,” Lexa interjects.

“How old are you now?” asks Clarke.

“Almost seventeen.”

“Junior year?”

“Yes.”

Clarke tips her head in understanding and explains, “I started the year before you then, I would have been in my senior year now if I’d stayed. I left before you started too.”

“But why did you leave?” Lexa presses Clarke.

“I’ll get to that bit,” Clarke replies.

The conversation is interrupted by the waitress and the arrival of their food. Clarke is practically salivating as the waitress sets her burger down in front of her, and Lexa accepts her chicken with a polite murmur of thanks.

“Do you girls need anything else?” the waitress asks.

Lexa glances across at Clarke, who just shakes her head quickly, eager to tuck into the meal in front of her.

“No thank you,” Lexa tells the waitress. “That’s everything.”

“Enjoy your meal,” the waitress says to them, before she turns and walks back over to the counter.

Taking a huge bite of her burger, Clarke lets out a content moan and closes her eyes, as if they are at a gourmet restaurant, rather than just a little diner in one of the scummier parts of town.

“Oh my God, this is good shit!” exclaims Clarke.

Lexa cuts into her chicken and skewers a small chunk on the end of her sauce, smearing it around in the barbecue sauce until it is covered and then lifting it to her mouth. She’s definitely eaten better, but it’s not bad food at all.

“Okay, where was I?” asks Clarke, picking at her fries with her fingers and dipping them in the pot of sauce at the side of her plate. “Oh yes, so I started high school. My parents were rich, I was doing well in all my classes, I had lots of friends. Like I say, I had everything. Until the accident.”

Lexa feels her insides do an ominous little flip in her stomach at Clarke’s words. Her throat goes dry, knowing that Clarke is about to tell the story about something truly terrible, and she reaches for her soda, taking a long sip of the cool drink.

“What accident?”

“There was a collision on the interstate,” Clarke explains, her eyes trained firmly on Lexa’s face as if watching for her reaction, even as she continues to pick at her fries. “A big one. It made the news and everything. Multiple people were seriously injured and they airlifted them to the nearest hospital, the one my mom works at. She’s a spinal surgeon, one of the best in the state, and so she’s used to operating on victims of major collisions like this one, people who need some kind of miracle in order to live. She’s good at her job. She can fix almost anyone, if only she gets to operate on them.”

Clarke’s last sentence is laced with contempt, a bitterness that Lexa can only assume is directed to Clarke’s own mother, and she leans forward in her seat slightly, nodding at Clarke to encourage her to continue with her tale.

“You have to understand that this was a major collision and the theatres in the hospital were overrun, the surgeons were in high demand,” Clarke informs Lexa. “There were two men involved in the collision who required an urgent spinal operation, but only one theatre and one team of spinal surgeons. My mom could only operate on one of them and whichever one she didn’t choose would die.”

Lexa inhales sharply, her brain working in overtime to try and figure out the missing pieces of this story, even before Clarke gives them to her. Her heart pounds in her chest, hammering away like an erratic drummer. She can see where this story might be going, and even though the events are in the past, she prays that Clarke’s story does not end the way she thinks it might.

“The guy she chose is called Michael,” Clarke tells Lexa. “He works in construction, he has a wife called Linda and two boys who were aged three and five at the time. Thanks to my mom, those two boys still have a father.”

“And the man that she didn’t choose?” asks Lexa, fearing the worst, despite not ever knowing either man, or Clarke’s mother.

“He died before she finished operating on Michael,” answers Clarke. “Thanks to my mom, I _don’t_ still have a father.”

Lexa gasps in shock, the noise that she makes so loud that she’s surprised the few other patrons in the diner haven’t looked up from their meals to see what the problem is. That the second man would die from his injuries, Lexa had been expecting. That the second man would turn out to be Clarke’s dad, comes as a complete surprise. She knew that there had to have been some kind of series of devastating events for Clarke to make such a downfall in society, but she never would have dreamed that the story began with tragedy.

“Your father? He was involved in the crash?”

Clarke nods, her blue eyes glistening with tears.

“Clarke, I’m…”

_I’m sorry_. Those are the words that Lexa was going to utter, but before she can finish her sentence, she realises how useless the words are. Lexa has nothing to apologise for, and she is positive that Clarke must have heard those same two words from tens, if not hundreds of others, each offering the blonde empty words of sympathy.

Choosing to bite her tongue, Lexa pauses and then says instead, “That was an impossible decision that your mom had to make.”

Clarke looks relieved that Lexa hasn’t attempted to try and patch up an unhealable wound with meaningless words about what a terrible tragedy it is for a teenage girl to have lost her father so young.

“I know,” Clarke nods in agreement, “and I know that she couldn’t have chosen it the other way. The hospital has rules against operating on family so she wouldn’t have been able to do it herself, but she could have let the rest of the team work on him instead. Letting that guy die so that she could save my dad would have been selfish and that’s not who she is, but she still made the decision to let my dad die. She killed my dad.”

“Clarke…”

“Lexa, don’t,” Clarke shoots a warning glance across the table and Lexa obediently closes her mouth, picking up her knife once more to slice through the chicken on her plate that suddenly doesn’t seem so appetising any more.

They sit in silence for half a minute, each focusing on nothing but the food in front of them and their own thoughts. When she glances up at Clarke to find the blonde looking at her, Lexa realises that Clarke is waiting for Lexa to finish processing the information that she’s just been given, waiting for Lexa’s signal for her to continue the story.

“So then what happened?” Lexa asks.

“My mom took on extra hours at work,” says Clarke, nothing in her tone indicating that she’s just imparted the details of her own father’s untimely death. “She couldn’t save my dad so she tried to make sure that she could save as many other people instead, as if that would somehow make up for the fact that she let her own husband die. She worked so hard to push through her own grief that she neglected mine. She never once stopped to remember that she had a fifteen year old daughter who had lost her father, and that I needed her around more than ever to help me through it. I didn’t just lose one parent that day, I lost both of them.”

Lexa wants to say something, she really does, but she doesn’t think that she can quite find the words to express what she’s feeling at the moment. She’s always known that she’s lucky to have the parents that she does, two hardworking individuals who always make sure that she has everything that she needs and love her and encourage her in anything that she does, but hearing Clarke’s story just makes her appreciate them even more.

“I turned against her,” continues Clarke. “I started drinking, I stayed out late, I got into smoking weed. I met Raven through a mutual ex-boyfriend and then through her I met Octavia. They don’t have parents either, so they understood and they never asked questions. We used to go shoplifting and vandalising shit. Stupid, I know, and we stopped after we almost got busted, but I finally belonged somewhere. I turned rebellious, and do you know what the worst part was?”

“What?” asks Lexa, wondering exactly how things could get worse than this.

“My mom was too busy saving lives at the hospital to even notice that I’d gone wild.”

Clarke’s eyes are filled with sadness and a hint of regret, and though Lexa has never met Clarke’s mom, she’s already starting to form a list of all the things she would shout at her for neglecting her own daughter in such a tough time for them both.

“So how did you come to change schools?” asks Lexa, a concerned frown on her face.

“I got kicked out,” Clarke says simply. “I bunked off a lot to hang out with my new friends at the local high school, so my grades dropped. When I did go to school I was often drunk or high.” Clarke hesitates, then adds as an afterthought, “Or both. The teachers noticed that I was falling behind so they sent me for extra tutoring, then when they realised that it was probably due to losing my dad, they sent me for counselling. I never turned up to either. I got suspended one time for swearing at the principal. That was when my mom finally caught onto the fact that I wasn’t doing well, but she didn’t do anything about it. It was the final straw, so I ran away from home.”

“Where did you go?”

“To Octavia and Raven initially,” answers Clarke. “They both grew up in a children’s home, Raven since she was four, and Octavia and her brother ended up there when their mom died a few years earlier. I didn’t qualify for a room of my own there because I technically still had a home, but I wasn’t going to return to my mom so I spent each night on one of their bedrooms floors.”

“Do you still do that?” asks Lexa, eyes wide in horror at the thought of Clarke spending every night for the past almost three years sleeping on an uncomfortable floor rather than a bed.

“Occasionally,” shrugs Clarke. “Raven moved out of the home when she turned eighteen and she’s just moved into a two bedroom apartment with Octavia’s brother. Sometime I sleep on Octavia’s floor, sometimes I sleep on the couch at Bellamy and Raven’s. If I’m really lucky, Octavia will spend the night at her boyfriend’s and I get her empty bed. Other nights I go to a homeless shelter in the middle of town and hope they have room for me there.”

“Clarke, that’s no way to live!” Lexa objects.

Clarke doesn’t seem bothered by her living situation at all.

“Hmm, I’m used to it. It’s not that bad anymore.”

“But you don’t have anywhere permanent to live!” Lexa argues. “You don’t have your own bed! Look, my house is huge. We have more than one spare bedroom. I’m sure I could speak to my mom and ask her if you could take one of those.”

“I couldn’t ask that of you, Lexa,” Clarke protests.

“But you can ask it of Raven and of Octavia and her brother?”

Clarke hangs her head in shame, then mumbles so softly that Lexa can barely hear her, “Your mom _likes_ me. She thinks I’m a good influence on you. I don’t want her to think badly of me.”

“She won’t,” insists Lexa. “I’ll explain everything to her and she’ll understand.”

“But I haven’t even explained everything to you yet,” Clarke says, lifting her head and looking Lexa in the eye once more. “You still don’t know why I got kicked out of your school.”

Lexa’s eyes widen. She had completely forgotten that Clarke was in the middle of a story, her concern for Clarke’s wellbeing overtaking her desire to hear the truth.

“I just assumed that your mom stopped paying the school fees.”

Clarke shakes her head and says, “No. When I ran away from home I kind of forgot that food would be an issue and I ran out of cash pretty quickly. I needed a way to make enough to feed myself pretty quickly, so when one of my friends told me that he could set me up with some weed to sell to the rich girls at school that want to piss their parents off by buying soft drugs, I took the chance. Unfortunately for me, I got busted by the principal.”

Something clicks in Lexa’s mind, a memory from years ago long forgotten beneath everything that has happened since, slotting into place with everything Clarke is telling her.

“Wait, _you’re_ Clarke Griffin?” exclaims Lexa.

Lexa can’t believe that she never put the pieces together before. Clarke isn’t that common of a name, particularly for a girl, and she should have known that there being two Clarkes would be too much of a coincidence. Admittedly, Clarke has never imparted her surname to Lexa before, and the Clarke Griffin in the legends that spread through her classmates in the first week of their freshman year was made out to be nothing like the Clarke that Lexa has come to know, but she should have made the connection sooner.

“What? How do you…?” frowns Clarke.

“You were something of a legend in my freshman year,” Lexa tells her. “There were all these stories about a girl who had been in the year above us who got expelled for running an illegal drug-dealing enterprise from her locker.”

Clarke’s eyes widen in surprise, then drop to the almost empty plate in front of her, a blush rising to her cheeks but a little smile of pride tugging the corners of her mouth up.

“You make it sound so much more dramatic than it actually was,” Clarke shrugs as if it doesn’t matter at all. “One of the teachers caught me selling weed to some of the other girls in the locker room during gym class. The principal suspended them and kicked me out for good. That’s basically all there is to it.”

Lexa stares at Clarke, half intimidated by her and half in awe of how much more of a badass she seems to become each time she reveals a new layer of herself to Lexa.

“I’ve never even had a detention,” Lexa admits.

Clarke’s laughter causes Lexa to lift her head, and she grins across at the blonde sitting opposite her. Clarke returns the smile, and Lexa feels a warm glow slowly course through her entire body. Now that everything is out in the open, being with Clarke seems easy. Now that she understands the motives behind Clarke’s actions, the other girl doesn’t seem as intimidating anymore.

“Nor had I before my dad died,” Clarke replies, then adds, “Perhaps we aren’t so different after all.”

* * *

It’s a surprise when Lexa arrives at the bus stop after school the following day to find Clarke there again, and quite probably the first time that Lexa has ever seen her there on two consecutive days. In fact, were Clarke not with her two friends (Raven and Octavia, as Lexa now knows them, though she’s still unsure which name belongs to which girl), Lexa would probably walk over to Clarke and vocalise her observation. As it is, Lexa just smiles at Clarke as she passes, a warm rush of affection passing through her insides when the smile is reciprocated.

Lexa stops slightly further along the sidewalk, though not as far away from Clarke as she would usually stand on those days when the blonde has company. Though the two brunettes still intimidate Lexa, knowing that Clarke trusts her and likes her enough to share what she did yesterday at least reassures Lexa that Clarke won’t let her friends do or say anything to hurt her again.

She can hear the three of them whispering, though she isn’t close enough to be able to actually eavesdrop on their conversation, but when there’s a little bit of a scuffle and Lexa glances up to see what’s going on, one of the girls is giving Clarke a shove in Lexa’s direction.

“Go on,” the girl calls after Clarke.

As Clarke approaches her, Lexa would almost dare to say that a delicate blush is rising onto Clarke’s cheeks.

“Hey Lexa.”

Lexa’s throat goes dry suddenly. She becomes very aware that their friendship has shifted since their heart to heart yesterday, perhaps even now reaching a stage where it _can_ be called friendship. The fact that Clarke has chosen to abandon the two best friends that she told Lexa were basically her family, admittedly with a literal push from those friends in Lexa’s direction, is possibly the first tangible proof of the change in their relationship.

“Clarke,” Lexa acknowledges, her voice barely a croak.

When Clarke remains silent but shifts her weight quickly from one foot to the other, then back to the first again, Lexa realises that Clarke wants to say something specific to her.

“What is it?” she prompts the blonde.

“I, um…” stammers Clarke.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, get on with it Clarke,” one of Clarke’s friends, the one with her hair pushed back into a ponytail and wearing a red jacket with the sleeves rolled up, calls out impatiently.

“You know what, _I’ll_ do it,” the other girl says boldly, crossing over to where Lexa and Clarke stand with something of a swagger in her step, the girl in the red jacket following her until they both stand in front of Lexa. “Hey, nerd. So it’s my birthday next week and we’re throwing a party at my brother’s apartment and Clarke wants to invite you.” Without even pausing for breath, she turns to Clarke and says, “See, Clarke, wasn’t that simple?”

“Sorry, who are you?” Lexa pipes up timidly.

“Octavia Blake,” replies the girl, her eyes scanning up and down Lexa’s body once, and Lexa immediately feels incredibly self-conscious about her uniform and all of the school guidelines that it so pristinely follows. “Nice to meet you. So are you going to come?”

“To your birthday party?” asks Lexa. “But I don’t know you.”

With a roll of her eyes, Octavia says, “Yes, but you know Clarke and she’s the one inviting you.”

“Why would Clarke invite me to _your_ birthday party?” asks Lexa, feeling as though she’s missing an incredibly important piece of a much larger picture here.

“Jesus _fuck_ , Clarke,” groans Octavia. “I see why you like this one, she’s as useless as you.”

Lexa finds herself blushing at Octavia’s words, at the clear implication that Clarke has been talking about Lexa to her best friends, and that those conversations have covered the fact that Clarke actually _likes_ her.

Turning to the blonde who still stands silently beside her, Lexa asks, “You’re inviting me to your friend Octavia’s birthday party?”

“Yeah,” nods Clarke. “If you want to come, that is.”

“But why?”

Clarke shrugs one of her shoulders, and then answers, “Because I thought we were friends and that’s what friends do.”

Clarke’s friend, the one that is not Octavia and therefore must be Raven, seems to find something that Clarke says very amusing because she starts sniggering in the background. Octavia elbows her giggling friend in the ribs and then drags her away down the sidewalk, affording Lexa and Clarke a bit of privacy.

“Oh,” Lexa says in response to Clarke’s previous statement. “When is the party?”

“Next Friday night.”

“And will there be alcohol there?”

Lexa feels stupid as soon as the question leaves her lips, because this is Clarke and of _course_ there will be alcohol there, but Clarke doesn’t laugh or make fun of her innocence.

“Octavia’s brother is twenty three, so yes. You don’t have to get drunk though.”

“I’m not sure my parents would be too pleased to have to pick me up in the middle of the night, especially if I’ve been drinking,” Lexa admits.

“You can stay over, it’s fine,” Clarke offers, the corners of her mouth turning up into what is as close to a friendly smile as will ever be seen crossing her face. “Just bring a sleeping bag and crash on the floor. It’s what the rest of us will be doing.”

Lexa considers the offer for a few moments. Clarke wants her to go to a _party_ with her, a party in which there will be music and lots of cool people that Lexa doesn’t know and alcohol. Almost every cell in Lexa’s brain is screaming for her to decline the offer, because she’s pretty sure that combining all of those different elements, as well as the crush she has still has on Clarke that just sits there unobtrusively bubbling beneath the surface, is a recipe for disaster.

_But this is Clarke_ , the other, less rational part of Lexa’s brain says. _Clarke is inviting you to be one of the cool kids for once_.

“You seriously want me to go to your friend’s party?” Lexa clarifies.

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

“And this isn’t a joke?” asks Lexa. “It’s not a _let’s get the posh girl drunk and make fun of her_?”

“Of course not!” Clarke protests. “Listen Lexa, my friends probably aren’t what you’re used to, but they’re not bad people. I mean, Jasper’s just got out of juvie for some narcotics thing but he’s pretty much the most harmless of the lot.”

From the way that Clarke says the word ‘narcotics’, a cautious edge to her tone, Lexa suspects that she means something significantly less legal than the pot that Clarke occasionally smokes. And not that Lexa doesn’t trust herself to make responsible decisions, because she does, but she realises that there may actually be such substances in use at this party, and Lexa doesn’t know how she feels about that.

“I want you there, Lexa,” Clarke continues. “I understand that it might not really be your scene, but it would mean a lot to me if you turned up.”

Clarke’s persuasive words have their desired effect, because Clarke _wants_ her here, and really, who is Lexa to deny a pretty girl what she wants.

“Okay,” she says cautiously. “I’ll be there.”

* * *

Lexa’s parents are more than keen for her to “go to Clarke’s for a study sleepover”, which is why the following Friday sees Lexa getting onto Clarke’s bus rather than her own after school.

The apartment building that Clarke takes them to isn’t the nicest place that Lexa has ever been. In fact, it becomes obvious that it’s pretty crummy from the moment that Clarke pushes open the door that leads in from the sidewalk, which Lexa notes from the ease at which they manage to get inside has basically no security at all. A sign reading _Out of Order_ is lopsidedly taped to the doors of the elevator, there’s a suspicious brown stain that Lexa would rather not look at for too long just to the left of the entrance, and what little Lexa can see of the concrete stairwell has been enthusiastically graffitied by more than one vandal.

Lexa feels out of place in her school uniform and wishes that she’d had the foresight to change into the clothes she has in her backpack before leaving the school premises earlier. Only because Clarke is by her side does Lexa feel slightly safe.

“I hope you like stairs,” jokes Clarke, as she crosses the foyer. “Bellamy’s apartment is on the sixth floor.”

By the time the two of them reach the sixth floor, Lexa’s calves ache from the ascent almost enough to distract her from the graffiti and the unnerving smell of urine that seems to grow stronger the higher they climb. _Almost enough_.

“You okay?” Clarke asks when the two of them pause to catch their breath next to a sign on which someone has oh-so-maturely altered the ‘I’ in _SIX_ to become an ‘E’, leaving Lexa wondering if this entire building is inhabited by middle schoolers.

Lexa nods and follows as Clarke leads the way down the dingy corridor, stopping outside an unmarked door and hammering on it with her fist.

It only takes a few seconds for the door to be flung wide open by a tall guy with a mop of dark curly hair on top of his head. His curious eyes land on Lexa, narrowing slightly as they take in her immaculate uniform, then cross to Clarke, a grin breaking out on his face.

“Hey, princess.”

“I told you not to call me that,” Clarke replies drily, softly nudging her fist into his bicep. “This is Lexa, by the way.”

“Hi Lexa, it’s nice to meet you,” he says as he holds out his hand, which Lexa takes and gives a firm shake. “I’m Bellamy, Octavia’s brother.”

“Where is Octavia? Is she here yet?” asks Clarke.

“ _Lincoln_ ,” Bellamy spits the name in disgust with an accompanying roll of his eyes, “has taken her on a spa day.”

“Relax,” Clarke says, pushing past Bellamy into the apartment, shrugging off her jacket as she does so. “The girl only turns seventeen once.”

“Who is Lincoln?” asks Lexa, following Clarke inside so that Bellamy can close the door, and stepping out of her school shoes.

“Octavia’s boyfriend,” Clarke explains. “Bellamy doesn’t like him because he’s managed to last way longer than the two weeks that the guys Octavia normally goes for last.”

“No,” Bellamy corrects her, “I don’t like Lincoln because he is way too old for Octavia and he thinks it’s appropriate for her to take the day off school when finals are less than two months away.”

Clarke glances across at Lexa, the traces of a smirk on her face, and Lexa realises that Bellamy must not know that his sister regularly skips school with much worse excuses than to go on a spa day with her boyfriend. She heeds the intense plea in Clarke’s wide eyes and keeps silent on the matter.

They are drawn away from this conversation however, by a loud whoop from somewhere within the apartment followed by a shout of, “Fuck yes!”

“What’s Raven up to?” Clarke asks Bellamy.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he shrugs. “With Raven it could be anything from finding a matching pair of socks to bringing down the patriarchy.”

Bellamy leads them through the apartment and into a small kitchen, where it transpires that Raven’s victory cry is a result of successfully tossing a piece of popcorn into the air and catching it in her mouth. Judging by the mess of popcorn scattered across the kitchen floor, many of her attempts weren’t quite as successful.

“Damn it, Raven,” sighs Bellamy. “We’re supposed to be getting this place ready for a party, not creating a mess.”

He reaches into the small gap between the fridge and the wall and pulls out a broom, which he thrusts in Raven’s direction.

“Spoilsport,” grumbles Raven, though she accepts the broom and starts sweeping up the mess that she has created. She glances up when she notices Lexa hovering in the entrance to the kitchen, and pauses in her efforts to tidy up. “Oh, hey nerd. Nice rags. You wearing that to the party?”

Lexa blushes under Raven’s intense gaze and hangs her head slightly, curling her fingers so that they disappear into the ever so slightly too long sleeves of the blazer that she still wears.

“Stop it, Raven,” Clarke hisses at her friend. “Bell, can Lexa use your room to get changed?”

As Clarke ushers Lexa back through the tiny apartment and into one of the bedrooms, Lexa wonders whether she’s even going to survive until the following morning at all.

* * *

In hindsight, it’s probably mostly Raven’s fault that Lexa ends up making such a complete fool of herself at the party.

It all starts shortly after Octavia and Lincoln arrive fresh from their spa day, nestling themselves in a tangle of limbs in an armchair that is definitely much too small for the both of them to fit in. Octavia gushes about her day to anybody who will listen for more than a couple of seconds (Lexa makes that mistake, and then has to politely feign interest as Octavia gives her a complete rundown of the manicure she received), interspersed with comments about how great of a boyfriend Lincoln is for treating her on her birthday.

“Oh my God, you two make me want to be sick,” Raven mimes vomiting from the other side of the room as Octavia leans in to press her lips against Lincoln’s for the third time in as many minutes.

“Just because you need to get laid, doesn’t mean you have to take out your frustration on me, Raven,” retorts Octavia, resting her head on Lincoln’s shoulder.

“Oh, I’ll find somebody else to take my frustration on, don’t you worry,” quips Raven. “Right, Bellamy?”

And that’s the moment that Raven starts outrageously flirting with Bellamy.

At first Lexa decides that she must have missed something and concludes that Raven and Bellamy must be a couple, because Raven is not subtle in the slightest about the way that she continuously hits on the older Blake sibling. But when Bellamy doesn’t respond in sorts for the fourth time and Lexa notices that he’s doing absolutely nothing to encourage Raven’s ‘advances’, for want of a better word, Lexa realises that Raven has ulterior motives.

The obvious target is Octavia. Raven has made it clear on multiple occasions that she is less than pleased with the constant display of affection that Octavia is showering her boyfriend with, and Bellamy _is_ Octavia’s brother. It’s only natural that the younger brunette would get pissed at the inappropriate comments that her best friend is sending her brother’s way. Or at least, Lexa expects that Octavia would get pissed if she tore her attention away from Lincoln for long enough to notice what Raven is saying to Bellamy.

However, it soon becomes apparent that Raven is _not_ doing it to annoy Octavia.

What with Octavia canoodling with Lincoln in the armchair in the corner, and Raven’s relentless stream of filth aimed at Bellamy, it just leaves Clarke and Lexa awkwardly making idle conversation. And when Lexa catches Clarke shooting Raven the middle finger as she helps Lexa hang up a huge _Happy Birthday_ banner, a gesture that she thinks was perhaps not meant for her eyes, she realises that Raven’s blatant flirting with Bellamy is being used against Clarke, not Octavia, in an attempt to highlight _something_ between Lexa and the blonde girl.

“Raven, could you blow up these balloons for me?”

“You know, Bellamy, for a moment there I thought you were going to ask me to blow something else.”

Like Lexa says, not subtle at all.

Lexa looks across at Raven, who catches her eye immediately, glances briefly over to Clarke before her gaze returns to Lexa, then shoots her a sly wink. Lexa snaps her eyes away from Raven’s knowing smirk, a heavy blush burning her cheeks a fiery red colour, and she very quickly realises one thing. _Raven must know about the kiss_.

And then the pizza arrives.

Raven has been the one to order the pizza, so naturally Lexa blames her for that too, but she finds herself with Clarke pressed up against her side as they tuck into the warm pizza in the box sitting across both of their laps. Lexa, still feeling flustered from Raven’s wordless insinuations that something is going on between her and Clarke, can’t help but remember the last time that she shared pizza with Clarke, or perhaps more significantly, she can’t help but remember what occurred _after_ they shared pizza.

Oh God. Now Lexa seriously can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to feel Clarke’s lips against her own once more. And adding alcohol to the mix won’t help matters at all.

* * *

“That is complete bullshit!”

Lexa rarely swears. In fact, the only two reasons that curse words ever leave her lips are if she’s been drinking or if somebody starts _really_ annoying her, and as she’s currently on her third beer and the crap that is currently coming out of Bellamy Blake’s mouth is so scornfully ridiculous, it’s hardly surprising that she’s started cussing.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” argues Bellamy. “It makes perfect sense.”

The party has been going on for a couple of hours now, and out of the fifteen guests in the apartment, Bellamy and Lexa are the only two currently in the kitchen, each cradling a cool bottle of beer as they participate in their heated debate.

“You can’t tell me that the fall of the Roman Empire is down to the fact that the Romans stopped worshipping the Olympian gods,” Lexa says exasperatedly.

“Yes I can,” Bellamy says defiantly.

Lexa shakes her head impatiently and takes a long sip from her beer. She’s never particularly liked beer and the bitter aftertaste that it leaves in her mouth, but faced with a choice between a fridge full of Bud Light and the hard liquor that is set out across the kitchen counters, Lexa decided at the beginning of the night that beer was probably the safer choice. And faced with the stupidity of Bellamy’s argument, she doesn’t really care what the alcohol she drinks is, only that it _is_ alcohol.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong you are,” she tells him. “The whole theory is just preposterous.”

“And the theories that the Roman Empire collapsed because of the rise of homosexuality or because of an increase in Islamic citizens aren’t?” Bellamy counters, raising one eyebrow in Lexa’s direction.

“Well of course those are ridiculous theories too,” Lexa agrees, “but I’m not trying to tell you that one of those is true. I’m just disagreeing with your reasoning.”

A boy that Lexa doesn’t know the name of wanders into the kitchen, looking a little lost, and she lets her eyes follow him as he grabs an almost full bottle of vodka from the counter and then leaves the kitchen with it. When they are once again alone, Bellamy continues their debate, his eyes still bright with an argumentative enthusiasm.

“So why do _you_ think the Empire fell?”

Lexa takes a sip from her beer and then just shrugs.

“Probably something to do with their economics. Overspending in the military or something like that.”

“Sounds like modern day America,” snorts Bellamy with a shake of his head, and Lexa can’t help but laugh in agreement.

“Historians can’t even decide in which century Rome fell, let alone the cause of it,” Lexa points out.

Though she had thought it a very good point, Bellamy’s eyes light up as soon as she says it and he grins across the table at her.

“Which is why you can’t prove that it didn’t fall because they stopped worshipping the Greek Gods,” he announces triumphantly.

Lexa’s mouth falls open in horror at the sheer inanity of the drivel coming from Bellamy’s mouth right now.

“But you can’t prove that it did either!” she splutters. “Your argument is just appealing to ignorance, implying that it must be true because there’s no evidence to the contrary. It’s an incredibly narrow-minded way of hypothesising something that is much more than just a yes or no answer.”

Bellamy doesn’t seem put off by the way that Lexa completely shuts down his argument.

“You’re looking into it far too much,” he shrugs nonchalantly. “All I’m saying is that it’s kind of cool to think that Zeus destroyed an entire civilisation because they stopped worshipping him.”

Lexa is almost tempted to agree with Bellamy on that one, just so that she can make a comment about it hardly being surprising, given the fragility of the male ego, but she’s far too determined not to let Bellamy win this argument to concede defeat.

“You’re completely ignoring the fact that there’s no proof that the Greek Gods are even real. It’s called _mythology_ for a reason.”

Lexa is thankful that Raven chooses that moment to enter the kitchen, stopping to roll her eyes when she sees the two of them still sitting in exactly the same places as they were half an hour ago.

“Please don’t tell me you two nerds are still arguing,” Raven sighs. “Lexa, don’t indulge him, he’ll talk for hours. He’s got a huge book of mythology in his room that he jacks off to every night.”

“Suck my dick, Reyes,” Bellamy retorts.

Raven eyes glint mischievously and she responds, “Bellamy, you know that you don’t even have to ask.”

She plants a sloppy kiss on Bellamy’s stubbly cheek, which he immediately wipes off with a grimace on his face.

“Oh, by the way Lexa,” Raven turns her attention back to Lexa, “I think Clarke is looking for you.”

As if on cue, Clarke stumbles into the kitchen, a confused frown on her face at first, though a big smile quickly cracks through when her eyes fall on Lexa.

“Lexaaa!” Clarke draws out the final syllable for far longer than necessary as she comes up behind Lexa and rests her chin on the top of Lexa’s head, draping her arms casually around Lexa’s neck from behind. “ _I_ invited you to this party and you’re spending more time with my boring friend than with me.”

“Don’t forget who bought the alcohol, Clarke,” Bellamy reminds her, and despite the fact that Clarke is behind her, Lexa can picture the way that the blonde is currently rolling her eyes at her friend.

“You’re still only on the beer?” she snorts. “Come on, Lex. Let’s get you onto the stronger stuff.” Lexa’s insides do a little flip at the affectionate nickname, but she doesn’t have time to comment on it before Clarke’s hand find hers and drags her out of the chair that she’s sitting in, a playful glint in her eyes. “Have you ever done a proper shot of tequila?”

“No,” admits Lexa.

Clarke drags Lexa across the kitchen enthusiastically, to where the bottles of liquor are lined up on the countertop.

“Come over here. Raven, do you want to go and get O? She’ll get mad if she finds out we’re doing the fun stuff without her.”

“Seriously?” Raven quirks an eyebrow at Clarke. “You want me to extract her from her lip lock with Mr Muscle?”

Clarke shrugs, and says, “I know that she likes Lincoln, but she likes tequila too and it is her birthday.”

Bellamy, who is leaning back in his chair so that his entire weight is balanced on just the back two legs, sipping at the beer in his hand, lets out a disgruntled noise.

“I don’t think I like this plan to get my little sister drunk.”

Clarke pushes playfully at Bellamy’s shoulder, causing him to lose his balance and desperately reach out for the wall to stop himself from falling backwards onto the tiled floor.

“You’re getting boring in your old age, Bell,” Clarke tells him. “Besides, Octavia is already drunk. All her own doing too.” Turning her attention to Lexa, Clarke says, “Lexa, could you check in the fridge for limes?”

Lexa nods obediently and swings open the fridge door, pushing aside the bottles of beer and the limited groceries that could only belong to two broke young adults until she finds two small limes at the back. She closes the fridge door once again and sets the limes down onto the counter next to where Clarks is pouring out shots of tequila.

“Tequila shots?” exclaims a new arrival to the kitchen, a skinny boy with dark hair and a pair of oversized goggles perched on the top of his head. “Oh, awesome! Count me in!” As Clarke reaches for another shot glass and fills it up, the boy asks, “Hey Clarke, have you got a lighter on you?”

Clarke fumbles around in the back pocket of her jeans for a couple of seconds and emerges with a small red lighter, which she tosses across the kitchen to the boy, who promptly drops it.

“Hey,” complains Bellamy, as the boy picks up the lighter and starts using it to try and light a joint that he pulls out from behind his ear. “No smoking indoors, you go out onto the balcony for that. If the fire alarm goes off I don’t fancy trying to explain why there are fourteen drunk teenagers in my apartment.”

“Sure thing, Bellamy,” agrees the boy, reaching across to pick up one of the shots and tipping it into his mouth without bothering with the salt or the lime that Clarke is currently slicing into wedges. Wincing at the taste, he announces, “Gah, I hate tequila,” and then leaves the kitchen.

Clarke glances across to Lexa with an expression of amusement on her face.

“That was Jasper,” she explains. “He’s a little crazy, but he’s nice.”

Crazy, but nice. Just like Clarke. Just like most of Clarke’s friends, from what Lexa has seen so far. She thinks she could perhaps get used to that.

* * *

Dancing has never been Lexa’s forte. Her strengths lie in areas such as arriving to places five minutes early, and colour coding notes in class, and paying for things using exact change. Definitely not dancing.

The problem is, that after three beers and two shots of tequila, Lexa _thinks_ that dancing is her forte.

She’s not the only one who is severely overestimating her own sense of rhythm under the influence of alcohol. Clarke has been shimmying around the living room for the past ten minutes, her hips swaying from side to side in moves that are definitely not PG-rated. Between Clarke’s ass and the ample chest that threatens to spill out of her low cut top with every vigorous shake, there’s not really anywhere else that Lexa wants to look.

She knows that she is being far from subtle in her admiration of the blonde. The way that Raven catches Lexa’s eyes from across the room not twice, but _three times_ with a knowing smirk on her face tells her that. But Lexa is pretty certain that Raven is the only person alert enough to notice. What with Lincoln and Octavia getting incredibly handsy at one end of the couch, Bellamy prowling the room picking up empty bottles and shooting his sister glares out of the corner of his eye as he does so, and most of the rest of the partygoers either too drunk or too high (or both) to notice, Lexa is managing to get away with rather a lot more staring than she should be able to.

Not that she’s complaining.

Lexa can only attempt to compete. The last time she danced was probably in a ballet class in middle school, and there’s a reason that she quit, namely her complete lack of coordination. She isn’t entirely sure how dancing at parties is supposed to go, other than the fact that it is the complete opposite of anything she has ever tried before, and with the alcohol in her system giving her the confidence boost that she needs, she tries to copy the movements of Clarke’s hips with her own.

Judging by the way that Raven seems to be struggling to contain her laughter the fourth time that Lexa makes eye contact with the dark-haired girl, it’s a pretty unsuccessful attempt.

A defeated pout on her face, Lexa watches as Clarke continues to dance without a care in the world, her hands raised above her head, her eyes closed and a content smile on her face.

“Hey, Lexa!”

Lexa’s head snaps up and she finds Raven beckoning her across the room.

“You know she’s doing it for you, right?” Raven asks in a low voice when Lexa arrives to stand next to her.

“What?”

“Clarke,” Raven elaborates. “She’s dancing for you. You should go for it.”

Though Lexa has a pretty strong suspicion what Raven is talking about, she chooses to dumbly ask, “Go for what?”

“She invited you here because she likes you,” Raven explains, an amused smirk on her face, “and judging from the way that you can’t keep your eyes off her ass, you like her too. She _wants_ you to make a move.”

Lexa can’t help herself from blushing. She _never_ talks about her feelings, much less her feelings of attraction. She doesn’t even indulge her closest of friends in conversations about her crushes, so the fact that a total stranger has already figured out that she’s completely infatuated with Clarke is unnerving and slightly embarrassing.

“Why doesn’t _she_ make the move?”

Lexa regrets her words immediately, realising that it’s as good as a confession that she _does_ in fact see Clarke in that way and that besides admitting to Clarke that she enjoyed kissing her, this is pretty much the closest that Lexa has come to acknowledging her own sexuality to anybody other than herself. Raven however, seems unfazed.

“Because it’s _Clarke_ ,” Raven rolls her eyes. “She likes to overcomplicate things.” Raven falls silent, then adds as an afterthought, “Plus from what I’ve heard, _she_ made the move last time.”

If Lexa’s cheeks weren’t flushed before, she knows they must be now. She does everything she can to avoid making eye contact with Raven, which of course means that her eyes fall to Clarke once more right as the blonde shakes her hips from side to side.

Lexa wonders if it’s possible for her to turn any redder.

“You’re doing it again,” Raven nudges her with an elbow. “Go for it. She’s not going to turn you down.”

* * *

It turns out that Lexa’s idea of ‘going for it’ is not really going for it at all, but instead letting Clarke, who is breathless and flushed in the most beautiful of ways, drag her out onto the balcony where Jasper and two other guys are passing around a joint.

“It’s Lexa, right?” asks Jasper, and Lexa nods. “Do you smoke?”

“No,” answers Lexa.

Jasper’s eyes light up and, holding out the joint in Lexa’s direction, he asks, “Do you _want_ to smoke?”

Lexa opens her mouth to politely decline, because even with an alcohol-addled mind she can still remember those couple of health classes they had in sophomore year about drugs and their dangers and she had pledged to herself that she would never take them, but with alcohol already in her system and the feeling of Clarke’s body pressed into her side on the tiny balcony meaning that she can think of nothing else, all rational thought is removed from her mind.

Clarke takes the joint from Jasper’s outstretched hand and raises it to her mouth. Watching as Clarke takes a long drag from it, Lexa gapes in awe at how the joint between her lips makes Clarke suddenly twenty times cooler than she was just a few seconds ago. Lexa knows that smoking marijuana probably isn’t the best idea, but just the fact that she’s at a cool party, with cool people, makes her think that maybe this is it, the moment that she finally starts climbing the social ladder.

And really, how much damage can one drag do to her health?

“Can I?” Lexa asks, holding out her hand to take the joint from Clarke’s fingertips.

An amused expression on her face, Clarke lets Lexa take the joint and watches intently as she raises it to her lips. Lexa suddenly feels very self-conscious, hoping that it’s not too obvious from her technique that she’s never smoked anything before. She inhales, a frown on her face, and then immediately starts coughing, the smoke getting caught the back of her throat.

“Have you ever smoked before?” Clarke asks her, and Lexa shakes her head, blinking rapidly to ease her watering eyes. “Take a deep breath from your diaphragm, you don’t just want to suck it into your mouth, you want it to fill your lungs.”

Lexa lifts the joint to her mouth again and does as instructed. Her throat tickles, but it doesn’t burn in the same way that it did before.

“Good,” nods Clarke. “Now hold your breath for a few seconds and then breathe out.”

Lexa holds it in her lungs, then exhales slowly, watching the cloud of smoke billow in front of her face as it leaves her lips. Clarke gives her an approving nod, and Lexa smiles to herself in pride.

The joint gets passed around their little group and Lexa is pleased when her second drag is much smoother than the first. Clarke gives her another encouraging little smile, and perhaps it’s the alcohol, or maybe the newly inhaled pot is already having an effect on her, because she feels a surge of confidence as soon as she’s passed the joint across to Jasper. Leaning back against the railing of the balcony, Lexa slides her arm behind Clarke’s back and curls her hand around Clarke’s waist. Her heart hammers against her chest a couple of times in nerves, but then Clarke leans into her properly, and she breathes out in relief.

Feeling bold, Lexa nuzzles her face into the blonde curls that fall down over Clarke’s shoulders and whispers so that only Clarke can hear her, “I really like you.”

Clarke turns her head, and the action means that her forehead is pretty much pressed up against Lexa’s now, their faces so close that Lexa almost has to cross her eyes just to look at Clarke.

“You do?” Clarke asks.

“Yeah,” confirms Lexa.

Clarke eyes scrunch up and she says, “Say it again.”

“I really like you,” Lexa repeats, wondering where Clarke is taking this.

A slow smile spreads across Clarke’s face, and it takes all of the willpower that Lexa can muster not to lean forwards and kiss her, but the loud chatter of the other three people on the balcony, who seem oblivious to the moment that the two girls are sharing, stops Lexa from closing the gap between their lips.

As if reading Lexa’s mind, Clarke asks breathlessly, “Do you want to go inside?”

Lexa knows that there’s an underlying meaning within Clarke’s words, she’s not just asking if Lexa wants to go inside, but to go inside for a particular reason. What exactly that reason is, Lexa isn’t entirely sure, but even just the thought of having Clarke’s lips against her own once more is enough for her to nod eagerly.

As Clarke smiles shyly and reaches down to lace their fingers together, then leads Lexa back inside and through the apartment, Lexa feels kind of numb. Her hand tingles where Clarke’s skin touches her own, and though she can still hear the noises of the party, the thumping music in the living room, a few voices down the hall and the unmistakeable sound of somebody retching in the bathroom, none of it really registers properly in her mind.

The kitchen is empty now, as are several of the bottles on the countertop, which kind of explains why at least one person is having a rough time of it in the bathroom, but no sooner has that thought registered in Lexa’s mind does it disappear completely, along with any thought other than the acknowledgment that Clarke is standing right in front of her, their still joined hands hanging loosely between them.

“Say it again,” Clarke says once more, taking a step closer so that Lexa’s back is leaning against the counter, Clarke’s body pressed into her front.

“I really like you.”

Lexa wonders if this is some kind of test, but with the close proximity to the blonde girl, she lifts her free hand and places it low on Clarke’s hips, so low that it would only take on tiny movement and then she would just be cupping Clarke’s ass.

“I really like you too,” Clarke murmurs, her words filling the tiny space between them, even though she utters them so softly that they are barely audible.

As inexperienced as she is, Lexa knows what comes next. Her throat goes dry and the prospect and she slowly untangles their fingers so that she can place that hand on Clarke’s other hip, anchoring herself to something because just knowing that Clarke is about to kiss her is probably enough to stop her legs from functioning altogether. Clarke’s face gradually moves closer to Lexa’s, almost as if it is happening in slow motion, and Lexa is hyperaware of everything; the feeling of Clarke’s fingers digging into her waist, the scent of Clarke’s perfume filling her nostrils, the pumping of blood through every single vein in her body as her heart hammers out an erratic beat.

It’s all so intoxicating to the extent that Lexa actually feels herself start to go lightheaded, and she thinks that the kitchen counter behind her and Clarke’s hands might actually be all that’s keeping her upright.

But then, with Clarke’s lips mere centimetres from her own, Lexa recognises the familiar feeling rising up within her, a nausea that is definitely not being caused by the pre-kiss nerves that she originally believed it to be. She swiftly raises a hand to Clarke’s shoulder and reluctantly pushes the blonde backwards, muttering a short apology, before dashing over to the sink and emptying the contents of her stomach into it.

Clarke is at her side immediately, a soothing hand running up and down Lexa’s back as she continues to retch, her throat burning and her eyes watering.

“That’s it,” Clarke whispers words of comfort into Lexa’s ear, producing a hair tie from somewhere and using it to secure Lexa’s hair in a loose knot on the back of her head. “Better out than in.”

“I’m sorry,” Lexa murmurs, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Don’t be,” Clarke hushes her. “It happens to the best of us.”

Lexa lifts her head to look at Clarke, aware that she must look quite a horrific sight, makeup smudged by her streaming eyes, but not feeling well enough to care what Clarke thinks.

“I’m sorry for ruining the moment,” Lexa elaborates.

“Don’t be stupid,” Clarke dismisses her, and then immediately rubs her fingers across Lexa’s back as Lexa starts retching into the sink again. “This doesn’t change anything.”

The following morning, those will be the last words that Lexa remembers of this night, but for now, she just holds onto that tiny bit of hope as she continues to sob and heave over the sink, an otherwise helpless mess of tears and regret.

* * *

When Lexa wakes up, there is not an inch of her body that does not hurt. Her head throbs with the beginnings of her first ever hangover, the back of her throat is dry and burns in a horrible reminder of how last night ended for her, and there’s a dull ache in one of her legs. She feels absolutely horrendous and vows never to drink again.

Letting her eyes flicker open, Lexa takes in her surroundings. She’s lying on the edge of the couch, a well-placed and thankfully empty bucket on the floor just below her. The living room is full of bodies sprawled out across the floor, a few hastily placed pillows and sleeping bags being used by those who weren’t too drunk to pass out without them. A rumbling snore fills the room, and Lexa’s eyes fall to Jasper lying on his back next to the billowing curtain of the open door to the balcony, his mouth open and his chest rising and falling in time with the noise.

As she awakens properly, Lexa becomes aware of a warm mass pressed into her back, a regular pattern of warm breath tickling the back of her neck. There’s an arm draped across her, wrapped around her middle from behind, and Lexa recognises one of the bracelets on that wrist as Clarke’s.

She wants to savour the moment, Clarke blissfully sleeping behind her, but nature is calling her and she slowly extracts herself from Clarke’s grip without waking the blonde, then silently crosses the room of sleeping bodies to go to the bathroom.

Once done there, Lexa goes into the empty kitchen, taking a clean glass out of one of the cupboards and filling it with cold water. She drinks it all in one go, then refills it again and drinks half of that too, the cool liquid soothing her burning throat and providing a small amount of relief to the dull throb in her temples.

“Hey, Lexa.” Octavia enters the kitchen, her hair a straggly mess, the previous night’s make up now smeared across her face and her voice barely a croak. “Wow, you look as crap as I feel.”

Lexa leans back against the kitchen counter and sips on her water, watching as Octavia fills a glass of her own and then stands opposite her. The silence is kind of awkward, the two girls having never really spoken to each other beyond that one time at the bus stop, and Lexa has no idea what to say to fill the void between them.

“So,” Octavia says casually, “you and Clarke, huh?”

Lexa chokes on the water in her mouth, spluttering in surprise as Octavia’s words. She takes a few seconds to compose herself, then asks, “What about me and Clarke?”

Octavia just raises an eyebrow at her, and Lexa knows that her attempts to be subtle became completely futile the moment that she almost sprayed water across the room at even the barest mention of Clarke’s name.

“There _is_ no me and Clarke,” insists Lexa.

Lexa catches a flash of blonde out of the corner of her eye, and she looks up to see Clarke standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She’s wearing a hurt expression on her face, and as much as Lexa regrets her words, there’s no way that she can take them back with Octavia still in the room.

“Morning, Clarke,” says Octavia, her eyes flickering anxiously between the two girls.

Ignoring her friend, Clarke folds her arms across her chest and gives Lexa a glare so icy that it could probably freeze an entire ocean.

“Lexa, do you need Bellamy to give you a lift back to your house?”

The message is as clear as any; _I don’t want you here anymore_.

“No thank you,” Lexa replies politely. “I can get the bus back, it’s fine.”

Octavia continues to gape at the two of them, the expression of shock on her face at the surprising twist the morning has taken in such a short space of time reflecting exactly how Lexa feels too. She can’t really believe that not even ten minutes ago she was curled up in Clarke’s arms on the couch, and now the same girl is pretty much telling her to go away and never come back.

“I should get my stuff and go,” mumbles Lexa.

The clock on the front of the stove tells her that it is not even nine in the morning yet, but Lexa doesn’t really want to be here any more than Clarke wants her here.

“Yeah,” agrees Clarke, “you should.”

“Clarke…” starts Octavia, a displeased frown on her face, before she turns to face Lexa. “Lexa, you don’t have to go just yet. At least wait until Bellamy cooks us all breakfast…”

“It’s fine,” Lexa insists. “I have stuff to get on with today anyway.”

It’s honestly one of the most uncomfortable situations that Lexa has ever found herself in, not least because Octavia’s presence, gaping at them in sheer disbelief as her eyes flicker rapidly between the two of them, doesn’t even afford them the privacy that they might need to even attempt to resolve their differences.

“I’m going to go now,” Lexa breaks the silence. “Thank you for having me, Octavia. I hope you had a good birthday.” Lexa turns her attention to Clarke, who continues to frown disgruntledly in return, and starts, “Clarke, I’m…”

She trails off uncertainly, unsure that she can find the words to articulate exactly what she wants to say. The phrase ‘I’m sorry’ falls to the tip of her tongue, but the bitter taste that it leaves doesn’t feel quite right and so Lexa keeps it to herself.

Shaking her head, Lexa says nothing more than, “Never mind,” before she leaves the kitchen and the apartment for good.

* * *

It’s not that Lexa doesn’t expect to see Clarke at the bus stop any more, for it would be stupidly self-centred of her to believe that Clarke would start getting a completely different bus on those days that she stays until the end of school, but she does expect their interactions at the bus stop to cease.

Lexa knows that she fucked up completely at Octavia’s party. They’ve progressed so far in these last few weeks, learned to understand each other and themselves, started to figure out how each of them has to compromise in their friendship, yet in a way that makes each of them a better person. And then Lexa has taken everything back to square one in a single thoughtless sentence.

_There is no me and Clarke_.

If there hadn’t been before, there is definitely no Lexa and Clarke now.

Or so Lexa thought.

“Hey.”

She almost doesn’t believe that it is Clarke at first, that it is instead merely her eyes tricking her when she turns her head to see a the girl trudging towards her and then sitting beside her on the wall in a familiar slouch.

It starts raining. Of _course_ it starts raining, only Lexa doesn’t have her umbrella with her this time which means that they are both going to get soaked. It is raining and Clarke is standing beside her. If she wasn’t still in complete shock that it is Clarke that has approached her and not the other way around, Lexa would perhaps find something bitterly poetic about the situation.

Lexa remains silent. It’s not just that she can’t think what to say, though that is definitely hindering her too, but that she doesn’t think that she would be able to speak right now.

“So I’ve been thinking a lot about that night at Octavia’s party,” Clarke ventures. “Anyway, I couldn’t figure it out. Right up until you were sick I was certain that you were into me. And yeah, I know that you were drunk and possibly a little bit high, but despite that I thought I’d read the signs right and…” Clarke trails off and lets out a heavy sigh, before continuing, “I spoke to Raven about it too and she says that you were definitely into me too. But I don’t understand why you would then tell Octavia that there was nothing between us when there clearly was.”

“Clarke…” Lexa tries to interrupt with an apology that is still only half-formed in her mind, but Clarke doesn’t let her get a word in.

“And then I decided that the only thing that makes sense is that you weren’t comfortable with my friends knowing anything about us, and I realised that I’d never really asked you if you were okay with me telling my friends about you and what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry if I accidentally outed you to my friends when you weren’t ready.”

For the first time since Clarke sat down beside her, Lexa looks across at her.

“What?” she gapes in confusion.

“If it’s a sexuality thing, I get it, okay?” says Clarke, smiling reassuringly. “I’ve done all that self-discovery stuff. I understand that it’s difficult and I’m sorry if telling Raven and Octavia that we kissed made you uncomfortable. It wasn’t my right to tell them. I just came here to tell you that if it is a sexuality thing, I’m here if you want somebody to talk to, okay?”

Lexa still really doesn’t know what to say. She tries to process Clarke’s words in her head, taking the assumption that Clarke has made and aligning it with her own confusing thoughts, trying to figure out if it’s the truth. She’s pretty sure that it’s not a sexuality thing though, she’s very private about her attraction to women but she’s not ashamed of it. Lexa thinks that she would be private about who she was attracted to if she were straight too, and perhaps that is the problem instead.

Realising that Lexa is not going to say anything, Clarke pushes herself off the wall with a sigh and reaches into the pocket of her jacket, pulling out a folded slip of paper and holding it out to Lexa, who takes it and opens it.

“This is my number. You can call me anytime if you want to talk about it.”

Clarke pushes her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket and takes a few steps backwards, away from Lexa. She glances once down Lexa’s body, then back up to Lexa’s face again, a pained frown on her face.

“Bye, Lexa.”

As Clarke turns around and starts walking away down the sidewalk, Lexa gets an overwhelming sense of finality from it all. Her tone makes it seem like she’s saying goodbye for the last time, her full appraisal of Lexa almost like she’s trying to commit it all to memory, as if she will never see her again. And Lexa quickly realises that maybe this _is_ goodbye forever.

Except that she’s holding a tiny scrap of paper with ten digits messily scrawled on it in black marker.

Which means that Clarke is leaving the future of this relationship entirely in Lexa’s hands.

“Clarke, wait!”

Clarke stops and turns, a hopeless expression on her face as the rain soaks through her clothes and plasters the loose tendrils of hair to her forehead. It’s a strange kind of beauty, not the classical kind, but a mixture of desperate longing and resigned defeat that just makes Lexa want to hold Clarke in her arms and never let her go.

“It’s not a sexuality thing,” Lexa tries to explain. “I just … Octavia seems to have more of an idea of what this is between us than I do and I panicked. I … I’m really crap with feelings and you’re really pretty and…”

_And please will you just come here so that I can kiss you?_ The words are on the tip of Lexa’s tongue and she doesn’t say them, but instead hopes that Clarke receives them telepathically or something. But then she remembers what Raven said to her at the party. _She made the move last time. Just go for it_.

And so Lexa does.

Lexa wonders if maybe she glides across the sidewalk to Clarke because she certainly doesn’t remember moving her legs, but all of a sudden they are kissing again. It seems like a lifetime ago that they last did this, clumsily making out on Lexa’s couch after eating far too much pizza, but the only thought that crosses Lexa’s mind as her lips find Clarke’s is that she’s _supposed_ to be doing this, that this is perhaps what her purpose on this earth is, to kiss Clarke in the rain without a care in the world.

Lexa brings her hands up to each of Clarke’s cheeks, her touch soft enough to convey all of the love and tenderness that she feels for the other girl, yet firm enough to anchor herself here in this moment, to remind Clarke that she is here now and that she is never almost losing her again.

To reiterate her point, Lexa breaks their kiss and leans her forehead against Clarke’s, then softly mutters, “I don’t want you to go.”

Her pupils so blown that the blue irises of her eyes are barely visible at all, Clarke replies as if it is the simplest thing in the world, “Then I won’t.”

* * *

The number thirty eight bus arrives at the bus stop less than a minute later, splashing a wave of cold muddy water across the edge of the sidewalk nearest to the road as it pulls up with a squeak of its brakes. The two girls at the bus stop are as different as two girls can be to any passing onlooker, one with blonde hair and the other with brunette, one in a worn leather jacket and the other in the once pristine but now rain-soaked uniform of the private school around the corner.

So caught up in each other are they that they don’t even notice the arrival of the bus, nor its departure thirty seconds later, leaving them both stranded in the rain with no umbrella between them.

So caught up in each other are they that they don’t even care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this story! There are vague plans for sequels in the fairly distant future if I ever get around to turning the plans into actual words but hopefully I'll write some other stuff in the meantime. Feel free to come and find me on [tumblr](http://almostafantasia.tumblr.com) to chat about this story or anything Clexa related.


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